


Just For The Cameras

by Flourish



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: A/B/O, Bonding, Concerts, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dating, Deviates From Canon, Domestic, Drama, Drugs, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Falling In Love, Family, Fandom Allusions & Cliches & References, Fangirls, First Time, Flashbacks, Happy Ending, Jealousy, Kid Fic, Kidnapping, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Marriage, Marriage of Convenience, Mary Sue, Medical Trauma, Metafiction, Mpreg, Multi, My First Work in This Fandom, Omegaverse, Originally Posted Elsewhere, POV Female Character, POV First Person, POV Original Character, POV Original Female Character, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, POV Third Person Omniscient, Polyamory, Polyandry, Pregnancy, References to Knotting, Slow Burn, Threesome, Weddings, Work Contains Fan(s) or Fandom(s), curtainfic, in heat, virgin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-10 07:18:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10432131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flourish/pseuds/Flourish
Summary: A story in a prologue and five nesting parts, in the form of Russian dolls—but as you get closer to the center, are you getting closer to the truth, or further away?You (or I, or Hannah) are a lucky girl. You're chosen to be Harry Styles' fake girlfriend, just for the cameras. But you (or I, or Hannah) are only at the beginning of your journey to try and understand what's going on beneath the surface of your favorite band in the world—who Harry and Louis really are, what they really desire, how they really live, and who they—and you—love most.This story is definitely Larry Stylinson, but also features a female character in the mix. It has a happy ending that many Larry lovers will like. Be warned, not all of the parts include all of the tags I've listed; if the thing you're reading for hasn't happened yet, be patient. A complete but very rough draft has been written and posted on Wattpad. It is being edited as it is posted here; be forewarned.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> If you've been reading this story awhile, you may wonder, "what's going on with the chapters?" Well, on Wattpad there were tiny, ridiculous Wattpad-style chapters. When I first started editing this story, I changed them to longer, AO3 style chapters. However, I don't love those either, as the story is essentially in 5 parts plus a prologue—I don't like the fact that AO3 doesn't let you have parts as well as chapters (unless you separate a story into different, well, stories, and that doesn't seem to fit either). So what I've done is condense all of Part 1 into a single chapter. I'll update Part 2 with the rest of the part, and then only post parts as I finish editing them. No comments have been destroyed in the chapter-condensing process; thank you for your patience!

> "That's all very well, Charles. But there are just two questions.  How can you know all this intimate stuff about your rather appalling king is true? And if true, how can one hope to print such personal things about people who, presumably, are still alive?"
> 
> "My dear John," I replied gently and urgently, "do not worry about trifles. Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff _will_ be true, and the people _will_ come alive. A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor."
> 
> \- Vladimir Nabokov, _Pale Fire_

* * *

She wakes up in the pre-dawn gloom with a powerful need to pee.

Someone’s tattooed arm is draped across her stomach, which isn’t helping. She moves it gently, trying not to disturb the person it’s attached to. Even groggy and desperate for the bathroom she knows it would be sinful to wake him up.

No, to wake _them_ up: because the person attached to the arm is Louis Tomlinson and on his other side is Harry Styles, curled up together like two spoons in a drawer. They look like a watercolor fanart in the low light, Harry’s curls wriggling over the pillow, Louis’ face peaceful and relaxed.

She levers herself out of bed and pauses to just look at them.

“You wakin' up now?” Louis says.

“No. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“’salright,” he says. “I’ve been awake.”

“Let’s not wake Harry too, then.”

Louis smiles, his eyes still closed, and doesn’t reply.

As she slips round the corner to the ensuite bathroom, her bare feet padding on tile, she thinks about them together. She thinks, they’re perfect for each other. They’re complete, a matched set. They’re the dream of the internet. They don’t need me.


	2. You

You love waking up late. No alarms today!

It’s been a perfect summer, even more perfect since your summer job ended and you could pack your damn alarm clock away. But you can feel the days getting shorter already, the weather’s going to cool off soon, and it’ll be fall before you know it. Before fall, though…

That’s when your sleepy brain finally remembers. Today is  _ the _ day! It’s the  _ day _ ! You get to see One Direction today! For a moment you let yourself flop back among your pillows and think,  _ holy crap, how could I ever have been so sleepy I didn’t rem _ _ e _ _ mber? How could I have forgotten for one single solitary moment?  _ Because it’s only your favorite band of all time, and it’s only the very first time they’ve come anywhere near your town, and it’s only going to be the best day ever…!

You can feel the excitement growing in the pit of your stomach even before you get up. You flail on your nightstand for your phone and discover that your best friend Maddy has been texting you like crazy.

> Maddy (11:01 AM) r u awake  
>  Maddy (11:02 AM) srsly r u awake  
>  Maddy (11:06 AM) RISE AND SHINE MOTHERFUCKER

Those are only the most recent three. There are literally twenty more starting at eight o’clock in the morning. She’s obviously even more excited than you are. You hold your phone at arms’ length and snap a selfie, text it to her.

> Me (11:09 AM)  T his is my 1d face

> Maddy (11:10 AM) #iwokeuplikethis?  
>  Maddy (11:10 AM) dont waste that put it on insta

She’s not wrong, though, it’s a good picture. You look sleepy in a cute way. So you  do as she says and put it up on Instagram. Before you’ve even managed to look at your Snapchat or your other texts Maddy’s all over it, commenting “#1D #onedirection #harrystyles #louistomlinson #liampayne #niallhoran #zaynmalik #bestdayever” and tagging fifty of her very closest Insta followers. You’re used to this sort of thing from her. She’s a fiend.

Nobody else is in the house—Mom’s at work, Dad’s at work, your brother’s at summer school because he flunked Geometry—so you get to take as long of a shower as you want, and blast the entire album  _ Midnight Memories _ while you’re doing it. You’re just regretting the fact that you have to leave the warm, steamy, jasmine-scented air of the bathroom when you realize your phone’s vibrating so hard it’s practically falling off the back of the toilet. Wrapped in a towel, you drip your way to see what’s so important. Maddy…?

“OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD,” she screams the instant you pick up. You hold the phone away from your ear.

“What?”

“OH MY GOD OH MY GOD.”

“You have to tell me what happened,” you say, trying to calm her down. You can tell from her tone of voice that it’s nothing bad, but you can’t stop your heart from clenching with anxiety. “You can’t just scream at me! I’m not psychic!”

“LOOK AT YOUR INSTAGRAM,” she says, and even though she’s not yelling any more you can still hear the capslock in her voice. “RIGHT NOW.”

So you do. And then you know why she’s freaking out. Because beneath her comment on your most recent photo, your bedhead photo, the photo where you’re wearing nothing but your ironic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sheets (not that anybody necessarily would know that from the photo—you’re not a skank or something), on that photo, is a comment from Harry Styles.

Holy shit.

* * *

Okay, so objectively the comment from Harry Styles is not life-changing. It’s life-changing to get a comment from Harry—he even liked the pic!—but the comment itself just says “nice.” And five hours later you are still trying to figure out exactly what that means.

“So let’s review. Obviously he thinks you’re cute,” Maddy says, kicking her feet back and forth as she lays across your bed, staring up at the 1D poster on your ceiling.

“Cute,” you say, unconvinced.

“C-u-t-e,” she replies. “Hot, maybe. Probably hot. ‘Nice’ is a think you say about hot people, don’t you think?”

You’re tracing the cobwebby cracks where you broke your phone’s screen. You broke your phone when you dropped it. You dropped it when you saw that Harry had commented on your Instagram and essentially said you were hot.

You’re trying to be very cool about this whole thing. You’ve always wanted to be something in the music industry, maybe a manager or an agent, and people say you’d be good at it. You know you’re a good negotiator (your grades are more a sign of cozying up to the teachers than studying). And last summer you talked Maddy into letting you manage her—she’s a great singer, especially gospel-church kinds of things—and you booked her three weddings even though she’d never sung professionally before. You made money off of it, too. When you applied to college, you’d listed your prospective major as Arts and Entertainment Management.

All this is to say that you really shouldn’t be starstruck. In fact it is going to be a requirement of your job, someday, that you not be starstruck. But it’s hard to not be starstruck about Harry Styles, and you still have butterflies in your stomach, even now.

So you’re looking at the comment again (really, for the bazillionth time) to try to convince yourself that it’s no big deal. The internet disagrees. There’s a ton of people congratulating you in comments, and more than a few other people telling you to die in a fire because you’re not  _ that _ cute.

Then you get an email from somebody. Somebody with an email address from One Direction’s management company. Subject line: BACKSTAGE PASSES?

The email is short and to the point. Harry liked your photo. He noticed that you were a 1D fan from your profile description, and saw that you were planning to go to the concert that night. He wanted to offer you and a friend backstage passes. Were you up for it?

Your stomach drops roughly to the center of the earth. Your head goes the other way. Your vision seems to have narrowed just to your phone’s screen. It can’t be real, can it? But it sort of has to be real, doesn’t it? Who would punk you like this? You don’t know anybody who would punk you like this. Nobody would be that mean. Which means that this is real. Which means that…

“OH MY GOD HE WANTS TO BANG YOU,” Maddy screams at ear-piercing pitch. “YOU FEEL LIKE HE WANTS TO BANG YOU, THAT IS HOW YOU FEEL.”

“Who wants to bang her?”

It’s Jake, your little brother, of course, come home from remedial geometry at the worst possible moment.

“HARRY STYLES,” Maddy says.

“The gay one?” your brother says.

“NO,” Maddy says. “Long hair does not make you gay.”

“Whatever.” He turns his baseball cap around like a dork as he slouches back out of the room.

“Typical,” you mutter, hitting ‘reply’ and beginning to type a response. “He just has to rain on my parade, right?” Your hands are shaking a little bit and it’s hard to type.

“What parade? I mean, are you going to do it?” Maddy asks, sitting bolt upright. Her eyes are very wide.

“Uh, why wouldn’t I?”

Maddy goggles. “Because he wants to bang you? I mean, that is literally what this is. You know it and I know it. This is a booty call.” She lets it hang in the air for a moment. “So. Do you want a booty call?”

You are not actually sure that this is a booty call. Among other things, no one has ever booty called you before. The farthest you’ve gotten was with the captain of the soccer team back in sophomore year, but after making out with him for like an hour after a game, you found out that he had actually never broken it off with his girlfriend, and you have more self respect than that no matter how hot he was,  _ God. _

But even if this is a booty call, even if it is about absolutely nothing about how hot you apparently are, is that so bad? It’s not like you’ve got a promise ring or anything. If you’re going to have meaningless sex with someone, and realistically most people do, why shouldn’t it be with someone you’ve idolized for years? You’re not an idiot. You can definitely handle this.

“You know what? I’m pretty sure that in this particular case I do, definitely, want a booty call.”

* * *

Maddy is absolutely adorable. She’s got hair and skin like Jidenna and she comes up about to your chin, and her chibi style matches her personality perfectly. You would never have actually made it backstage without her. First you couldn’t find where to pick up your passes, then the message from One Direction’s management hadn’t gotten through to the ticket office...you were a hundred percent sure someone was playing a joke on you. Maddy had to talk you out of just going back to your seats and forgetting the whole thing.

Then she turned on the charm, batted her long fake eyelashes, and got someone to call their boss, who called their boss, and guess what, the passes appeared.

Apparently ticket upgrades also appeared, because you were  whisked away to a VIP area with a whole crowd of people. They’re mostly girls and they mostly won tickets through the radio, and they’re all absolutely as excited as you, if not more. There’s one really little girl there with her dad, sitting on his shoulders, who seems like she’s in a total state of rapture. You pretty much are too, but this is different. She’s got tears streaming down her tiny face.

You can’t remember the last time you cried in happiness. Maybe at your cousin Amanda’s wedding? In your fevered imagination, someone in your shoes—someone Harry Styles had picked out of the crowd—would be delirious with emotion. She’d be incapable of forming words. She’d be a weepy mess already, like some of the girls you can see over in the non-VIP area, holding signs and freaking out because they managed to catch a water bottle Zayn drank from.

But right now, you’re that girl, and you don’t feel overwhelmed at all. It’s almost like you’re guarding your heart from pain. You won’t let yourself feel everything fully because if you did, and this turned out to be bullshit, you’d be just too hurt. You won’t let yourself feel everything fully because even if this isn’t bullshit, even if Harry really does want you, even if it’s a booty call and he’s super into you when you meet and everything’s just right, you know he’ll be on the road again tomorrow. You know what groupies are and you know you don’t want to be one, not for more than one night.

And realistically, it’s probably not even that. At worst, it could be someone punking you. At very worst, maybe you’re just part of someone’s plan to punk Harry. Maybe Louis or Niall saw you and thought “she’s the ugliest girl in the world” so they arranged for you to meet Harry, just to make him squirm…

...your imagination is running away with you. You’re not the ugliest girl in the world. You aren’t even enjoying the concert, because you’re fretting too much.  No,  you tell yourself firmly. You won’t give in to this kind of anxious speculation.

When the band takes a break you smile at the happy-crying kid and she and her dad talk with you a little. She got her tickets through Make-A-Wish. She has leukemia. She’s a lot older than you thought; her growth must have been stunted by the disease. Still, she doesn’t look very sick, and you’re too polite to ask, but she tells you right out: “There’s not any more treatments. So we decided, I’m just gonna have fun for now.”

For now, meaning until she dies. What can you possibly say to that?

She doesn’t seem sad at all, though. Not right now, at her Make-A-Wish concert. “You have a special pass too!” She lights up. You look, and yes, your pass matches hers. They both have big holographic borders around the outside. Nobody else in the VIP area has those. “I think that’s because you get to go to the meet-and-greet,” her dad says, and then the music starts up again.

* * *

One Direction is on what you’re pretty sure is their last encore. It’s “Best Song Ever,” and you know all the lyrics, of course, and you’re shouting along with everyone else, but then Maddy is grabbing your hand and pulling you out of the crowd and oh yes. It’s time to go. It’s time to go backstage. You gulp your heart down from where it’s lodged in your throat.

“Maybe it’s the way she walked,” they’re singing, “straight into my heart and stole it...” The Make-A-Wish girl’s dad carries her and leads you and Maddy to the stagehand who’s controlling access to backstage, the real backstage, and they smile at you like you’re actually special people and let you through the metal gates that are keeping everyone else away. “Through the doors and past the guards,” the band sings, and you are literally being swept through a set of doors into the endless hallways beneath the stadium. Behind you, you can hear the other people in the VIP area complaining. “Why do they get to go?” “Take me!” “I’m with her!” But you don’t look back.

Maddy squeezes your hand encouragingly. You can’t look at her.

You imagine you can hear their footsteps on the stage—it must be directly above your head now. You think about how they’ve been dancing and bouncing and wrestling around on the stage all night, having fun. You’re almost there and all of a sudden you’re not sure if you really are ready for this.

“I can’t wait!” Make-A-Wish girl says. “Isn’t this the best wish we could ever have gotten? All those people would do anything to be here!”

And then you realize that she thinks you’re a Make-A-Wish person too, that you’re in the same boat she is. You never told her otherwise. It’s the last straw: it just seems tawdry and cheap now that you’re going to meet One Direction. Best case scenario, you’re just some random on Instagram who Harry thought was hot. Sure, you like them. You like them a lot. But they weren’t your dying wish.

You mutter something polite and pull out your phone to distract yourself. The stagehand is arguing with somebody about whether you’re supposed to wait in this room or that room. Your brother is texting you.

> Jake (10:13 PM) kissed any gay dudes yet  
>  Jake (10:14 PM) j/k love u sis

That doesn’t help a lot.

Maddy knows how you’re feeling, though. You don’t even have to tell her. She squeezes your hand again and whispers in your ear, “it’s gonna be OK, whatever happens.” And you know she’s right.

Finally, the stagehand figures out where you’re going and leads you down another maze of corridors. It’s a relief to be moving again. If you stay focused on your breathing, on putting one foot in front of the other, on Maddy’s hand in yours, you can keep yourself together.

You’ve never been backstage at the stadium before and it’s interesting to see the different people working: guys in paint-splattered jeans like handymen, young women with walkie-talkies and headsets, one or two men in suits who look old enough to be your father. They must be with the record label or something. You pass by a bunch of full garbage bags in the hall. One of them is open at the top. It’s full of stuffed animals, candy, cards.

“Is that what happens to the stuff people send the band?” Maddy asks you, trying to speak quietly so the Make-A-Wish girl won’t hear.

“There’s probably too much for them to use,” you tell her.

The stagehand leads you to a door that reads ARTISTS’ DRESSING ROOM. “Wait here. They’ll be backstage in a minute,” he instructs you. There’s a woman inside. Their publicist, maybe? She’s almost as short as Maddy, and she’s busily typing away on her phone. When she sees you come in, she looks up briefly—but only briefly.

“Sorry. Just a sec. Wardrobe malfunction,” she says, as if that explains anything.

“Sure, sure,” you say, and look around. It’s pretty swanky in here: couches, a big screen TV with Super Smash Brothers paused mid-game, a big old fridge that you’re sure is full of Fiji water and snacks and whatever else One Direction’s tour rider requests. There’s a big bowl of browning guacamole on the coffee table.

“I read about the guacamole in People!” Maddy whispers to you. “Harry always asks for it. I bet he double dips...” she licks her lips lasciviously.

That finally gets through to you and makes you laugh. “You’re such a dork!”

“Well, don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to be that guac!”

“Yeah, yeah...” even her ridiculousness can’t totally distract you from the situation, though.

You always imagined a dressing room as a place a star got to make their own, full of roses and Playbills and things. Of course they wouldn’t be like that in the real world. The walls are white, the couches are the kind you see in waiting rooms. They’re pop stars and they’re on the road. They’re probably only in town for one night.

“OI!”

The door behind you opens and in pile five shouting, clamorous boys. Make-A-Wish girl makes a little “meep” sound and hides behind her dad, because, yes, it’s One Direction. And Niall’s pants are ripped front to back. His boxer shorts are sneaking out through the rip. They have little smiley faces on them.

“You fekkin’ idiot!” Liam is laughing as he shouts. “What did you think was going to happen if you try Harry’s—“ But then Liam stops, and Harry stops, and in fact they all freeze like deer in the headlights. Their publicist’s face is stormy.

“I’m so sorry about the language,” Zayn says, pushing Louis out of his way and speaking directly to Make-A-Wish girl’s father. He’s trying to be smooth, but you can tell he’s not very comfortable with it. “We aren’t usually this rude, and we don’t usually use so much bad language, but...”

“Speak for yourself, mate,” Louis snorts.

“Don’t worry about it,” Make-A-Wish girl’s dad says gruffly. “I was young once, even if you can’t tell now.” He scoots out of the way and gives his daughter a gentle push in Zayn’s direction.

This, Zayn can do. He kneels down and opens his arms and she runs into them, crying happy tears again. The publicist’s face relaxes, and the tension goes out of the room.

But not out of  you .

* * *

After a few minutes you notice something strange.

Everyone’s chatting away. Even though Niall’s pants are split open, he’s laughed it off long ago and is basking in Maddy’s eye-batting. Zayn is carrying the Make-A-Wish girl on his shoulders and Liam is jumping up to try and pat her on the head as she laughingly bats his hand away. Louis is talking sports with her dad. Harry, though, who’s the most energetic onstage, is hanging back.

Is he looking at you? Is that what he’s doing?

It’s really, really awkward. Instead of actually trying to talk to any famous boyband member, you do what you always do: fiddle with your phone. It’s under the guise of taking photos, so it’s pretty much OK, but it means that you don’t notice as the publicist sidles up to you.

“I never introduced myself,” she says quietly. “I’m Christina. I’m friends with your Aunt Jo.”

“Really?” you say, stupidly. She’s probably about the same age as your aunt (just ten years older than you). She’s Asian and she’s really pretty and...then the penny drops. “Oh! Of course.” Because Aunt Jo works in PR. She mostly represents hotels and things, but she’s why you wanted to get into management in the first place. When she was first starting out as an assistant at a PR firm, her job seemed so glamorous, jetting around to fancy places and seeing famous people. Of course, now you know that she was mostly fetching coffee and taking notes, but hey.

“Yeah, we work together some times,” Christina says, pulling her long hair back in a businesslike knot. She looks like she never stops working. “You probably wondered how the boys found your Instagram. Well...”

You hadn’t wondered, actually, but.

“Harry and I had an idea,” she says. “But for it to work, we need you. Hold on, just a sec.” Raising her voice, she proposes that everyone go peek out at the stadium from on-stage. The audience is probably well on their way home now, but it’ll still be cool for us to get to see the view.

Zayn gamely leads the way out. Louis and Maddy bring up the rear. They’ve both noticed that you, Harry and Christina aren’t following. Louis has a strange expression on his face, one you can’t quite place. “Go on,” Christina tells him.

“It’s OK,” you tell Maddy. She winks theatrically, then links arms with Louis and drags him out. You wouldn’t have dared touch him, but she does it as naturally as if she’d known him all her life.

You can’t hide behind your phone any more. Now it’s just you and Christina and Harry Styles, and suddenly he seems very close, very real.

You let Christina guide you to the couch. Whatever this is—and it isn’t a booty call—this is it. This is the part where you find out what’s going on. The cushions’ fabric is rough against your thighs as you shift, trying to get comfortable, knowing that’s probably impossible.

Harry pulls a chair up and sits down in it backwards. It’s a little too short, so he’s looking up at you, which ought to put you in a position of power—but it doesn’t. His eyes are so green and so real. They’re honest. That’s what’s so disarming. The other boys, they were putting on a show, trying to make nice in front of the fans. He’s just a person, trying to communicate with you.

“I’ll just spit it out, then,” he says, the first time you’ve heard him speak. He talks more slowly than you expected, and his voice is even deeper in person. “Your aunt said you were a smart girl, real grounded. And that you want to work in PR. And that’s what I need in a girlfriend. And I do. Need a girlfriend.”

Well, you think, wasn’t I an idiot for packing my toothbrush?

Because of course this was never about sex. You already knew that from the way Christina was acting but now it’s for certain. Who sees a girl on Instagram and tries to hook up with them? That’s something Mick Jagger would have done, except in the 1970s Instagram didn’t exist. It’s not something that anybody in One Direction would do at all. This is some twisted PR game. Maybe the people who swear boy bands are all bullshit, all made up, are right. Maybe everything you know about them is a big show, even the parts about their personal life, and this is just one more thing on that list.

But Harry Styles is sitting in front of you asking you to be his girlfriend, and on some deep level even if this whole thing was orchestrated by Aunt Jo the fact remains that  Harry Styles is asking you to be his girlfriend, and you are completely mesmerized by him. His lips are just as perfectly-formed as they look in photographs. You’re trying not to think of him too physically, but it’s hard not to stare at how his legs splay around the chair.

Christina the publicist is talking to you. “Your aunt said so many nice things about you,” she’s saying, “and she thought you might be willing to take a gap year as an intern with us!”

“Yeah,” you say, without thinking about it.

“Brilliant!” Harry says. Does he know that when he smiles he’s twice as dazzling as any Twilight vampire fantasy? He must. Nobody’s that handsome without knowing it. “See, I knew she would do it! Jo’s cool. She knew what she was doing.”

Christina still looks concerned. “Sign this,” she says, and shoves a clipboard with a piece of paper under your knows. You try to read it. NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT, it reads. As far as you can tell, it says that you can’t talk about anything, with anyone, unless you have Harry’s permission to do it.

You know you probably shouldn’t sign it, at least not without talking to Aunt Jo.

You sign it anyway.

“Great,” Christina says. “Now we can all talk comfortably. We’re really glad to have you on board!”

“Thanks,” you say.

“Now we’re going to say your aunt got you this internship, which is the truth,” she continues, not skipping a beat. “You and Harry met for the first time tonight. First rule: it’s always best to be honest. You realize this is going to be a full time job? You’re going to need to travel with us?”

“It’s not, like...” your tongue feels thick in your mouth. “This isn’t a real girlfriend thing, is it.” It’s a statement, not a question.

Harry looks awfully guilty. “Are you offended?”

“No! No,” you rush to assure him. “I mean, you don’t even know me at all, so—“

“It’s just that I don’t really want to be in a relationship right now, you get me, and Christina thinks it’d be better if I was, especially with a normal girl—“

“—and I mean an internship with a big PR firm, that’s amazing, it’s life changing, I mean who even needs college if you can learn on the job—“

As you talk over each other, Harry starts laughing. Your slow brain finally processes that it’s with relief. He grabs you by both hands and levers you out of the couch as he stands up, pulling you into a hug. It’s a totally unstudied gesture, just as free and easy as the thousand and one interviews you’ve watched where he manhandles Louis. He’s thinner than you would have thought but taller, and he smells like fabric softener, but also like clean sweat, and something delicious you can’t identify. Your cheek presses into his chest and you can feel his heart beat for one brief moment.

God help you, because the hug is simultaneously warm and comforting and totally electrifying.

And he wants you to be his girlfriend.

But not really.

* * *

At first you think the most difficult part of this is going to be explaining yourself to your parents. “Hey, guys, I just decided to blow off college to go on tour with One Direction!” But it turns out that Aunt Jo has been way ahead of you. She’d told your parents that she thought you’d get a great opportunity to intern at a PR firm, and they’d talked it over weeks ago and agreed to let you do it if you wanted.

Actually, you’re not sure “let you do it” is the right way to put it. Your parents thought it would do you good to take a gap year before college. They’d been pushing you to defer, but you had always been adamant: you were going to college in Boston just like Maddy, friends forever, and that was that. It took the biggest band in the world to change your mind.

Your parents don’t know about the fake girlfriend thing, of course.

When you tell your brother he just rolls his eyes and says “gaylord,” which you interpret as meaning “good for you, sis.” To take it any other way would set off a massive inter-sibling war, and you’d rather not have your last night at home be a fight.

The most difficult part of the whole thing, actually, is Maddy, because you can’t tell her anything.

That’s not strictly true. Christina gave you your talking points before Maddy came back from seeing the stage. Everything is supposed to be strictly about the internship, nothing related to being Harry’s girlfriend or anything. “She’ll never believe it,”  you told Christina.

“I know,” Christina says, and smiles conspiratorially.

It’s not till you’re in the car on the way home, trying to convince Maddy that nothing happened, that you understand Christina’s plan. Maddy is supposed to be the first person to start rumors about you and Harry. She’s supposed to suspect that something’s going on, and she’s supposed to tell people about it, and that’s supposed to be the way the news gets out. After all, she’s obsessed with public social media to a degree that’s disturbing. Just one Insta post could set Directioners off.

Well, Christina’s wrong. Maddy wouldn’t start rumors about you. That’s not how best friends operate.

But it sure doesn’t stop her from being annoying as shit. She messages you about fifty times overnight.

> Maddy (12:01 AM) L I A R L I A R  
>  Maddy (12:02 AM) i know u and harry did a thing  
>  Maddy (12:02 AM) i just dont know what thing u did  
>  Maddy (12:03 AM) was it sex u did I AM GONNA FIND OUT

  


The thing is, she’s right to be suspicious but she’s wrong about the actual content of what happened. You didn’t do anything with Harry; you’re not lying about that one bit. The whole point is that you’re not going to have to lie about anything, just let people draw their own conclusions. You’re going to be Christina’s intern, and you’re going to travel with the band, and you’re going to go out to dinner with Harry sometimes, and maybe you’ll go to the club or something. You’ll be dating Harry in the sense of “going on dates with Harry,” dates as in “things to do that you would write in a datebook if datebooks were a thing that still existed.” You will be photographed and people will decide what they think.

Some part of you knows that this is really really stretching the definition of “not lying,” though.

Still, the other thing you’ve realized (after sleeping on it) is that you’ve made a really good decision. Even if half of you is still disappointed that there was no booty call, the rest of you knows that this is going to be really good for your career. Plus, you’re going to get paid. Christina made a deal with you: all your expenses are gonna be paid while you’re with One Direction, and to sweeten the pot, they’ll pay for four years of college. No loans. None at all. You’ll be flying free.

Harry Styles has already changed your life.

> Maddy (8:00 AM) BB YOU GOTTA TELL ME SOMETIME  
>  Maddy (8:01 AM) im gonna find out eventually

Your phone’s buzzing with messages from Maddy as your mom pulls up to the Hilton. One Direction is staying there because it has the best “back of house,” apparently. That means they don’t ever go in the front door. The tour bus drives right up to the loading dock, they enter under a canopy to stop fans from harassing them, and they go straight up to their rooms and eat room service.

This is it. You’re getting on the tour bus with them and Christina, and then you’re going to be on to their next show. And after the shows in the United States are over, you’ll be following them on to...to London, or to the studio, or to whatever they’re doing next. You don’t really know.

“I love you, sweetie,” your mom says, as she puts the car into park and the bellhop rushes to open your door.

“I love you too, Mom,” you tell her. Dad’s already on his way to work, your brother’s still asleep. It’s just you and her. “You know, I knew I was leaving home this fall anyway, but...”

Your mixed emotions must show in your face, because she grins at you. “Did I ever tell you I followed a band around the whole country once?”

“No!”

“I even followed them to their Canada tour dates,” she confesses. “Your dad’s still a little sore about it, even though it was when we were in college. I broke up with him for awhile to do it. But you know, cute lead singer. So I get it. You have a good time, be safe, and call me, okay? And don’t forget that in a year you’re going to college.”

You really have a lot to be grateful for.

“Thanks, Mom,” you say, and then you’re off to the Presidential Suite—to One Direction.

* * *

“Here’s the plan,” Christina says, as you come off the elevator to the band’s floor. “The only people who know about this are me, your aunt, the boys, and their management. It has to look real.”

She escorts you to her room, not to the boys’ suite. Then she makes you stand in the middle of the room and paces around you like a tiger. She passes astonishingly frank judgment on a lot of things about you: clothes (“good, you wore jeans, stick with that, we don’t want anybody comparing you to Taylor Swift—you’d lose”), eyes (“try a little less eyeliner, the point is that you’re relatable, not Kylie Jenner”), hair (“maybe Louisa can give you a cut. She’s the boys’ stylist. But she’s not in the know, so don’t breathe a word to her.”

“So,” you say, “I’m here because I’m pretty, but not _that_ pretty?”

“Basically,” Christina says, as though that’s a perfectly normal thing to say to someone.

Maybe in the music industry it is, but it still kind of stings.

Well, that’s what you’re getting paid for.

Christina grabs her bags and ushers you back into the elevator. “Today you’re going to ride with the boys,” she announces. “It’s your job to get to know them.”

“Not just Harry?” you ask, as the elevator dings.

“Not just Harry,” she confirms. “They all have to get to know you and like you. You know Yoko Ono?”

You nod, distracted by the cavernous and empty parking facility. There’s just one bus in the whole place; it must be 1D’s. It’s unrelieved black, bigger than any bus you’ve everseen. You’re a little disappointed, oddly enough. You’d read in the gossip magazines that they traveled in a replica Mystery Machine. Not on this tour, evidently.

Christina stops and grabs your chin, forcing you to look at her and not the bus. “You don’t get to be like Yoko Ono,” she tells you. “Nothing about you is more important than One Direction.  _ Nothing. _ If you want to work in PR, you have to understand that you are not the story. Your job is to make sure that everybody gets along, not to have a good time. Understand me?”

“Yes,” you say. What else is there to say?

The bus driver gets out as you approach and silently opens the door. Christina doesn’t go in. “There’s one extra bunk,” she tells you. “For the next two tour stops, now until New York City, that’s you. Get real comfortable with all of them. When we get to New York, that’s when we debut you.”

The bunk that’s yours is immediately obvious. The others are all covered with various types of young-dude detritus. The whole bus is pretty full of young-dude detritus, actually. You message Maddy.

> Me (9:01) on bus waiting for 1d wish i could send pics they are soooo messy!

Then someone else is entering, and you guiltily shove your phone in your pocket. It’s Niall. “Ah, good to see yeh,” he says, obviously trying to be polite. “Heard you were coming with.”

You just have time to smile at him before the rest of them pile in. They’re in sweatpants and t-shirts, not their performance clothes, but Harry’s still wearing about fifteen pieces of jewelry and Zayn’s still got a diamond the size of a dime in his ear. “...so you’ll wait on FIFA till I’ve finished this chapter?” he’s saying, and you realize he’s clutching a fat book. Not exactly what you’d have imagined. When he sees you, he trails off.

“Well, maybe _she_ wants to play FIFA,” Harry says. “Do you? C’mon, you have no idea how fecking boring driving around is gonna get. You’re gonna get _so good_ at FIFA.”

You suck at games in general, but you know Harry’s going out of his way to include you and cover Zayn’s awkwardness. Anyway, how else would you break the ice? You have nothing to say to these boys (beyond “you’re so pretty”) and they’ve surely got nothing to say to you (beyond “so you’re our publicity stunt”). “Sure,” you say.

“Actually, I wanted to work on the ballad,” Louis announces. “Liam?”

“C’mon Lou,” Harry complains, “a minute ago you were number one FIFA supporter!”

“I thought about it and I don’t feel like it anymore.”

“I’ll play FIFA or not, I don’t care,” Niall says.

“We know you don’t care,” Liam says, sliding into the banquette and pulling out a laptop. “Look, let’s work on the ballad for an hour while we’re fresh. Then FIFA or whatever else.”

“And Niall can help for once, and H can get his story straight with the dame,” Louis adds.

“’The dame,’ huh?” you say. “That’s what you’re gonna call me?”

Louis shrugs, and you’re astonished by the total indifference in his eyes, so completely different from when he was chatting up Maddy just last night. “You’re temporary,” he says. “Nobody’s getting attached.”

* * *

The thing is, it’s really hard to focus on getting your story straight with Harry when all the boys are together on the bus.

First of all, Liam and Louis keep strumming and singing bits of the ballad they were talking about, the same bits over and over again as they work on them. You can’t tell the shape of it really because they keep playing just a few measures, but you can tell it’s about a forbidden love. Even if you weren’t a 1D fan to start with, hearing people sing would be distracting, but as it is it feels like you’re getting a real genuine window into their world. You just want to stop and soak it in.

Second, the bus is so small that when Niall gets kicked out of songwriting club (“you can’t rhyme ‘baby’ and ‘lady,’ that’s just crap!”) he has to pick between sitting with you and Harry or sitting with Zayn, and he picks you and Harry. He sits right next to you. You can smell his cologne, and what’s funny is you can’t tell the difference from the boys at school. For all you care, it could be Axe. Trying to figure it out is incredibly distracting.

Third, you saw the book Zayn was reading, and it’s  _ Pale Fire,  _ which you once tried to read and got so frustrated with you nearly threw it out a window. But maybe he’d be able to explain to you what it meant, and you’d rather be talking to him about it than talking to Harry about anything, because fourth, Harry Styles is still absolutely magnetic, and if you don’t pay attention to something other than him you’re going to get totally sucked in. You can already envision yourself slowly leaning closer and closer until you’ve weirded him out so much that he throws you off the bus.

So you don’t really get past awkward small talk with Harry, no. “Tell me your whole name again?” (As if you didn’t know his, and how to spell it, and how he got it.) “You grew up where? Cheshire? Tell me where that is exactly, I have no idea about UK geography” (True as far as it goes, but you know just what the bakery he worked in looks like, and the school he went to.) Finally you announce that you have to pee, and when you come back, Niall and Harry have kicked the songwriters off the couch and are playing FIFA.

You still suck at FIFA, but at least they enjoy beating you.

None of the boys are in the least bit bothered by the fact that you haven’t gotten your stories straight, but Christina is deeply annoyed.  When you get to the next town on the tour and she realizes you’ve been wasting time, she drags you to Harry’s room, locks the door, and sits over you like a vulture while you tell him your life story.

“...so Jake’s the bad kid, and I’m the good kid, and you know my parents like him better than me because of what they let him get away with,” you sum up. “But don’t get me wrong, they’re not really bad, just parents. Mom was surprisingly cool about the whole thing. I guess Aunt Jo knew about when she was a groupie...” and your voice trails off, because you hadn’t used the word ‘groupie’ even in your head to describe your Mom before. It suddenly occurs to you that groupies usually have sex with the band. Your brain can’t even really process that about Mom, but it’s five million times worse because you’ve made it seem like it’s equivalent to what _you’re_ doing, and...you blink like a deer in the headlights, waiting for someone to freak out. Possibly you are the person who’s going to freak out.

“I like your aunt Jo,” Harry says.

You don’t unfreeze.

He continues. “Her company’s helping us out when we’re in L.A. Christina comes round when we’re on tour, so Jo’s not our main publicist, but her business partner is.” You’re still blinking. “She probably didn’t tell you because she didn’t want you to get too excited.” He twists his mouth. “People do. Get excited. And weird.”

“Yeah, I probably would have gotten weird,” you say.

“You’re not weird now, though?” His green eyes sparkle and suddenly you’re really aware that you’re sitting on a bed, his bed, and he’s got a smear of ketchup on the corner of his mouth. It takes all your willpower not to reach out and clean it off.

As though she read your mind, Christina says, “Harry, ketchup,” and gestures sharply. He wipes it away.

“I don’t know about now,” you tell him. “I think I’d have to be a corpse not to feel a little weird. And then I guess I’d feel like a corpse? Anyway you’re all so nice, especially Niall...”

He clutches at his heart as though you’ve stabbed him.

“... _you and_ Niall,” you say, laughing. “But you know, it’s kind of different now that this is all just business.”

He ducks his head, pushes that beautiful curly hair back with one hand. “It doesn’t have to be that bad, does it?” he asks earnestly. “You’re gonna get along great. It’ll be nice to have someone other than the lads with us. It’s like a road trip, right? With new friends?”

“I was gonna go to college,” You tell him, “and I do have old friends, too, you know.”

“Tell me about them.” He flops back on the bed and props his head up on one hand. You have to scoot back to be able to look at him, tucking your feet up under you. It feels like a sleepover.

“Well, Maddy Martin’s the old friend who was going to go to college with me. I was gonna go to BU, Boston University, and she’s going to MIT...”

Harry’s eyebrows shoot up. “That girl who was with you when we met? The one who dragged Louis around?”

You grin. “The cute one, you mean? Yeah, you wouldn’t guess it, would you?”

“So Maddy’s your best? She can come spend time with us! We’ve got a couple of days in Boston, yeah? And then New York?” He looks at Christina like he’s asking permission. She nods. “Maybe your brother too?”

Christina doesn’t say no, but she looks at you searchingly. “Do you think you’ll be ready to do this by the time we’re in Boston?” she asks. “In a week?”

“Do what?”

“Convince your friends that you and Harry are together,” she says. “You don’t have to hide anything from me, or while we’re on the bus or the plane, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for anybody to know that this is for show who doesn’t have to.”

Harry puts his hand on yours where it lies on the bed. His hand is really big and really comforting, oddly enough, even though you’re also half-stunned by his touch. “It won’t be a big deal,” he promises you. “I’ll blow you a kiss from on-stage, how’s that?”

You think about it for a moment, first about your nonexistent acting skills, then about the very real excitement you feel when you even just catch a glimpse of Harry’s shoulders through a doorway. Then you think about how thrilled Maddy would be to get to see 1D again. To get to  _ party _ with 1D.

“I’ll be ready,” you promise.

* * *

Th e next day is completely full. With the Boston concert as your mental deadline, you’re ready to start tucking away details that you can use when...well, you’re not actually certain when someone will ask you about your relationship to any of the boys, but whenever it happens, you’ll be ready.

You go along with the band as they record bits at a local radio station—firmly in the persona of “intern,” just another part of their entourage—and then they’re spirited away to practice some before sound check and their act. You’re gently told to get lost for a couple hours, so you hang out and try to help the roadies carry things. You’re probably more hindrance than help, but they accept your presence unquestioningly. Swaggy (that’s what they call the guy who’s responsible for the band t-shirts) is the nicest. He’s probably seen much weirder things than a random girl joining the tour.

Before they open the doors to the arena, someone’s assistant finds you and sends you backstage. It takes you a good twenty minutes of wandering before you finally find the green room and convince the very large security guards that yes, you’re supposed to be allowed back there.

It looks like the twin of the green room  back home: couches, television, guacamole on the coffee table. Actually, it’s set up to look startlingly like the inside of their tour bus. The impression is heightened by the fact that Niall, Liam, Louis and Harry are still playing FIFA, but now they’re smoking a joint as well.

“Dame! I hear Swaggy fancies you,” Liam says, by way of greeting. He’s picked up ‘dame’ from Louis, you suppose.

“Swaggy’s the man,” Niall tells you. “The man with the plan.”

“The man with the weed,” Harry clarifies, crunching a chip.

“He gouges us, he does,” Niall says, “but if he likes you, I bet he gives _you_ a good price. You could do us all a favor.”

“You buy your weed from Swaggy?” you ask, looking around to see if anyone else is in the room, if anyone cares you’re talking about drugs with One Direction. There’s nobody else. This must be standard procedure.

“He knows someone in every town, doesn’t he?” Liam points out. “And we can’t exactly buy it ourselves. Think how that would look. ‘Hey, mate, can I get a dime bag? Oh, no, you don’t recognize me, sure, why would you think I’m some stupid pop star...”

They’ve more or less forgotten about FIFA now, except for Louis, who’s still playing as the joint dangles from his lips. “Oy, puff puff pass, Lou-Lou!” Harry says, elbowing him. “Be a gentleman, won’t you?”

Without looking, Louis hands the joint over his head to you. You take a quick pull and try to hand it back to Harry, but he refuses. “Asthma,” he says. “Never before a show. Maybe after.”

“Five minutes!” Christina sticks her head into the room, then wrinkles her nose. You try to hide the joint behind the couch. “You know you’re not supposed to do that in the green room.”

“We’ve got Febreze!” Liam tells her, picking up a bottle you hadn’t noticed and spraying it around—on the couch, into the air, into Harry’s hair. It smells like fabric softener mated with a bargain basement scented candle. It doesn’t do a lot to cover the smell of truly dank weed.

Christina’s not convinced and you don’t blame her. “Put it out. Where’s Zayn?”

It turns out that nobody knows where Zayn is, not even Swaggy the Man with the Plan (or the Weed), and that this is especially strange because Zayn is the most enthusiastic pothead of all. So it’s all hands on deck trying to figure out what’s happened to him, and that means  _ everybody, _ including you.

You don’t really think you’re going to be the one to find him, so you’re actually texting your brother something foul (he won’t stop bugging you about Harry being gay) when you catch motion out of the corner of your eye. Zayn is curled up behind something that looks like an uninstalled part of the set, carefully highlighting a line in  _ Pale Fire. _

You sit down across from him before he notices you’re there. When he does, he starts. “Oh shite.”

“Yeah, everyone’s looking for you,” you offer, shrugging. “Couldn’t put it down?”

He’s embarrassed! Zayn Malik is embarrassed. “Yeah, well,” he mutters, and takes a long drag on his cigarette to avoid having to say anything.

“I won’t tell,” you say. “I’ll say I found you...I don’t know. Making out with someone?”

“Perrie’d be really happy about that,” he says. “Thanks, it’s okay. Everyone knows I’m a nerd really. Not all that deep down either.”

“No everybody doesn’t!” you insist. “You’re the bad boy!”

“What, because I’m ‘dark and dangerous’?”

You have to give that to him. Of course he’s got dark good looks, but there’s nothing remotely dangerous about him in person. The only member of the band who comes off as a bad boy at all is Louis, who seems to spend all his time in a smolderingly bad mood. Zayn is just quiet.

Fortunately, he’s obviously getting over his embarrassment. “It’s for a MOOC,” he says, “distance learning and that. I’m not, like, a super-genius who reads Nabokov for fun or something.” He levers himself up and offers you a hand as well. “C’mon. Let’s go put on a show.”

* * *

One Direction is in the middle of singing “You and I” when you finally put your finger on what’s different about watching them now.

The show’s basically the same as the one you saw with Maddy back home: the back of the stage lit up with neon, mega-screens showing closeups, the boys running up and down a long walkway surrounded by fans. You’re in the VIP section again, right up at the corner of the walkway and the main stage. With you there’s more Make-A-Wish kidsand a gaggle of actresses you recognize from some CW show. They must be shooting around here.

It’s funny, because if you ran into this many famous people at any other time, you probably would’ve been falling all over yourself to get their autographs. Now it seems kind of silly. They’re probably just the same as the boys—basically normal people.

You’re actually enjoying yourself more this time than before, you realize. It’s because you look at the boys differently. When Niall asks everybody to “sing along, OK?” you’re pretty sure he’s holding in excitement. He’s definitely the one who gets highest off the crowd. When Liam blows a kiss to one of the girls in the audience, you know he’s got a checklist: kisses to at least five different fans, no more than ten. He told everybody about this plan on the bus. You’re tempted to count the kisses.

> Maddy (9:43 PM) doesn’t that depress u  
>  Maddy (9:43 PM) like I mean Liam fn blew a kiss at me when we saw him was that fake

Maddy is struggling with being jealous that you’re seeing them play again. Really you think she’s jealous about the whole thing. But she’s also excited that she’s going to get to see them in Boston, so she doesn’t know what to do with herself. You’re pretty sure she shouldn’t peace out on one of the first weekends of college—college at MIT, no less!—to see a band play, but then again you would definitely do the same thing. You’re an enabler.

You message her that you’re sure that, out of all the girls in the world, he meant it when he blew a kiss to her.

> Maddy (9:45 PM) FUUUUUUUUUUUUU

When the show ends, you’re more confident now than you were before. You lead the pack of VIPs backstage to meet the band, and the boys are charming as ever. Even Louis is interactive and kind, especially to the sick kids. Unlike last time, though, when the VIPs have left you pile into a black Escalade with them to head back to the hotel. There’s not enough seats for everyone to ride together with security, even after Christina offers to stay behind and find another way to the hotel, so you sit on the floor. It’s roomy and it’s not far and the drive doesn’t seem to care.

When you get there, Christina has evidently learned to teleport, because she’s already waiting for you. She escorts you all to the suite the boys will be sharing. You don’t start to suspect something’s up till she confiscates your phone, just as it’s buzzing (Maddy is going to be _pissed off_ that you didn’t respond).

“There’s a pull-out couch for you in there,” she tells you. Then she hands Liam an enormous bottle of Jack Daniels and says, “you know the rules. You go into that suite, you don’t come out till you’re sober, and you’d better be sober by eleven because that’s when the bus is leaving. And don’t leave a mess for housekeeping.”

“Yes, Mummy,” the boys chorus, sarcastic but good-natured.

“This is a bit of a tradition for us,” Liam begins to explain, once the door has closed. The main room of the suite is huge and luxurious, with a sunken conversation pit and white carpeting wall-to-wall. There’s a balcony and a city view, and you’re sure there’s at least five bedrooms. “You see...”

Niall breaks in. “We come from a more enlightened place. A place where lads are not expected to stay dry as a bone until they reach their twenty-first birthday.”

“We got into some trouble on our first tour. It was a bit hard to hush up,” Liam says, pouring shots of Jack into rocks glasses. “So now we have ‘relax nights’ where we very privately let off some steam. Especially when we’re in smaller towns where we can’t blend in.”

“What he’s saying is we all get a liiiiiiiiiiittle bit pissed and feel better,” Niall translates, “but we do it in a hotel and not a club somewhere.”

“You all do,” Louis says. “I might go out later myself. Sorry you can’t all come with. Tough to be so young.”

“Aw, you love us, Lou,” Harry insists. But Louis is slinking around back. He doesn’t look like he loves anybody right now.

“We all do shots together at the beginning of the night. It’s a rule,” Niall declares. “Nobody has to do any more than that, but everybody has to do that.”

Your stomach doesn’t exactly sink, but you’ve gotta admit, you’re a little nervous. You’ve shot whiskey before but you haven’t exactly made a habit of it, and these boys have been doing it since they were fifteen.

“That means you,” Louis says to you, unexpectedly. “Put hair on your chest.”

“Sure,” you tell him, and when Liam passes you your glass, you don’t even wait for the others to gulp it down.

When you look up, the whiskey stinging in your throat, you enjoy their reactions. Liam’s a little taken aback. Harry and Niall are gleeful. Zayn’s patient, like he’s above this whole childish drinking-games thing. But Louis, Louis looks enraged that you didn’t choke or splutter or beg off.

“Alright,” you say, staring right at him. “Pour me another.”

So the evening goes. The liquor takes the edge off your nervousness and somewhere around the fourth drink you realize that you’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to Relax Night in ages. This is because Niall, by now clearly feeling loosey-goosey, suggests playing Never Have I Ever.

“That’s shite, what don’t you know about us?” Liam points out. He’s the soberest of all of them, you’re pretty sure, and he’s definitely the only one who’s bothering to sip his drink rather than just periodically gulp the liquor down without tasting it.

“We don’t know about the dame. Or what color your pants are right now,” Harry points out. It takes you a moment: to Harry, underwear are “pants.”

“Black,” Liam shoots back. “Not Never Have I Ever material, Haz.”

“Truth or Dare?” Louis suggests. It’s the first time he’s spoken since the second round of drinks; he’s been noodling around on a guitar instead, with Liam and Harry occasionally harmonizing in hums.

“Alright then! Shot? Shot? Shot? Shot? Shot!” Niall shoves another drink into your hand. “You’ve gotta play, dame, that’s the whole point!” You let him drag you away from the window and its sweeping view of the city to the conversation pit, where everyone else was more or less already gathered. “NOW,” he says, in a booming emcee sort of voice, “WHICH LAD STARTS?”

“I just got asked a Truth about my pants,” Liam says. “I get to ask next. Louis, Truth or Dare?”

“Dare,” and the dare is to act like a dog and let everyone pet him. Louis howls theatrically and lumbers around on all fours, wagging his ass like a tail. He jumps up on Zayn and starts licking him, then acts like he’s going to pee on Niall.

“Petting!” Liam reminds him.

Louis shakes his hair out of his eyes and crawls towards you. His oversized sweater makes a long drape from the line of his spine to the floor, and you’re struck by how sinuous he is, not muscular like Liam and Niall or half-grown like Zayn but really lithe. Catlike, not doglike.

“Good dog!” you coo, suddenly realizing that you’re drunk. “C’mere, pup pup!” You grab his head and scratch behind his ears. His hair is incredibly soft. He thumps a knee against the ground. “Awww, did I hit the spot? Did I hit the right spot, pup pup?”

“WOOF!” he says, and prances clumsily over to Liam for more pets.

“All right, all right, dare done,” Liam tells him.

“Oy, what about me?” Harry complains. Louis cocks his head in the doggiest possible way and trots over. Then he starts humping Harry’s leg. “HEY!” Harry shouts, trying to push him off. “Haven’t you been fixed?”

Louis looks downright horrified, then laughs and lets Harry go. “My turn now, right?”

“Cheers to yeh!” Niall says, standing and lifting his glass. “A marvelous hound!”

“Cheers!” everyone echoes, and downs their drinks.

“My turn,” Louis repeats, sitting on the couch and putting one hand on each knee. He looks from face to face, settling on Harry’s. You’re sure he’s going to dare Harry to do something—but then he turns to you. “Truth or dare, dame?”

You really should pick truth. But suddenly you feel protective of yourself, of Jake and Maddy and your life back home. As long as they don’t know too much about you, you’ve still got some power, some part of you they’re not allowed to see. You know Louis would ask you about it, or about sex, or something embarrassing. You don’t need any help to embarrass yourself. At least with a dare you have an excuse: “he made me do it.”

“Dare,” you say.

Louis’ face is shuttered again, the way it sometimes gets when he looks at you. He’s pleased that you picked “dare,” you’re sure. “You’re gonna be Harry’s fake girlfriend, but you haven’t tasted the goods, yet,” he says. “I dare you to kiss Harry. A good one, mind.”

Niall wolf whistles. Liam punches Louis, just lightly on the shoulder, but enough that you can tell he’s irritated. Zayn laughs anxiously. And all the blood drains out of Harry’s face.

You don’t have time for that, though. The whiskey hums through your brain. This is the perfect excuse. It’s probably exactly what Christina wanted. She’s such a Slytherin, she locked you in a room with these boys hoping this would happen! You’ll get your first kiss out of the way, in case you have to do it later, for the paparazzi…

It’s all justification, all stupid flimflammery, but the deepest part of your id doesn’t care.

“I’m not a welsher,” you announce, and a couple of steps takes you across the conversation pit to where Harry is lounging.

“Me neither,” he says, and pulls you down to sit next to him. He doesn’t stop holding your hands. They’ve gone cold as ice in his warm grasp. It’s funny how your hands can be very, very nervous, when your mind’s wrapped in comforting drunkenness. He leans forward, letting you set the pace.

Your lips touch, light as a feather at first. You’re both trying not to push. But Niall yells “A GOOD ONE, MIND!” and Harry tilts his head and traces your lips with his tongue.

He doesn’t taste like whiskey, or you both do. He smells like himself—you know the Harry smell intimately already, and it’s delicious. Your hands pull free of his and come up to tangle in his hair. You lean into him, trying to incline your body towards his. You really just want more, to feel him pressed up against you, to melt into him, but you’d have to scoot forward and something in the back of your mind tells you that that’s not a good idea…

Because this is just a dare. You shouldn’t have gotten drunk. You shouldn’t have indulged yourself like this. It’s too much. You’re not going to be able to forget it. It’s that first line of cocaine, that first spoon of heroin.

Is it like that for Harry too?

When you pull away, you realize his emerald eyes are glazed, his expression dumbfounded as any addict’s.

You have to stop this, if not for your own sake then for his. If he told you once he’s told you a million times: No strings. You’re here to do a job, and the job is to play a part, not to actually fall in love.

“Good dare, Lou,” you manage to squeak out. “My turn. Back to you. Truth or dare?”

“Dare,” he says. Without looking at him you can hear he’s upset. You’ve got to find a way to lighten the mood! In a mad whim you have the answer.

“Kiss Harry,” you tell him. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!”

There’s silence.

You thought it would be a laugh. _Niall_ laughs, at least. “Some proper Larry Stylinson!” he chortles.

Louis doesn’t even smile. “No,” he says, and stands up, and goes to his room, and closes the door. He doesn’t even take his whiskey with him.

Obviously you’ve put your foot in it somehow, but you can’t tell if it was the dare you made Louis or the dare Louis made you. You look around, searching the boys’ faces. Zayn looks stricken. “I’m sorry,” you appeal to him. “I just thought, since he dared me...”

“Not a problem, dame,” Liam says, clearing away the empty glasses, obviously trying to find something to do with his hands. “Lou’s just prickly. And it’s late.”

“Come smoke with me,” Zayn offers. “Help you sleep.”

One thing’s for sure: as kind as they all are, you’re an interloper right now. Nobody really wants you sitting in the main room while they prepare for bed. So you let Zayn lead you out onto the suite’s balcony, overlooking the city. “Is this safe? No paparazzi?”

Zayn shrugs and sits down. The balcony doesn’t have a railing, it has a wall: you’re shielded from cameras, since you’re in the penthouse, unless someone’s climbed on the roof. You watch as he goes through the motions of packing a bowl, tamping it down, getting it started for you. His piece is red and white glass and it glows when he drags on it.

After you’ve both taken a couple hits, you’re feeling mellower. Today’s been more partying than you normally do in a year, and you really needed something to bring you down after the scene you sparked inside. You’re amazed when Zayn lights a cigarette on top of theweed. “How can you sing if you smoke that much?” you ask.

He tips his head back against the stucco wall to blow smoke into the night sky. “Habit?”

The lights are too bright for there to be many stars visible, but you can always pick out Orion, the hunter. Your hazy mind connects that to Louis, pacing around on all fours, wagging an invisible tail. Orion’s hunters? Did Orion have hunting dogs?

“What did I do in there, Zayn?” you ask. “Was I an idiot or what?”

He looks right at you with those deep brown eyes, fringed round with such thick lashes you’re envious. “You were an idiot,” he tells you.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Here all week.”

He exhales tobacco smoke. You exhale marijuana smoke. You wonder if Maddy is smoking on some dormitory balcony right now, looking at Orion. You could message her. You probably shouldn’t. Actually, now that you think about it, you can’t: Christina has your phone.

“You have to understand, Lou is very protective of Harry,” Zayn says, his words a little too precise to make up for the alcohol and weed. “He’s very...protective. He doesn’t like new people. Unless he brings them in. You think Liam’s Daddy Direction, well, maybe. But Liam’s more general, he watches out for everyone. Lou...” he gestures with the cigarette emphatically. “Lou’s Harry’s personal watchdog.”

That doesn’t make sense. “So the kissing thing...”

“He figured, Larry Stylinson, all that, you were a fan, probably you’re just having them act out your own little fantasy,” Zayn says. “You get sick of being someone’s fantasy.”

“No, m’mean, why’d dare _me_?” You’re missing some important words in that sentence, but fortunately Zayn seems to understand what you mean.

He spreads his hands out, cigarette still in his fingers. “Lou’s stupid?”

You can’t figure out what that means right now, not high and drunk as you are. You aren’t sure you’d be able to figure out what it means sober. What stupidity could make someone do that? He wanted you and Harry to kiss on some level. Why?

Zayn reaches out and pats your denim-clad knee. “You’re all right,” he tells you. “You’ll figure it out. Just keep thinking about it.”

“What’s ‘it’?” you ask, but he’s already cleaning out the pipe, knocking the ash and a good fair chunk of unsmoked weed into a topiary. If you’re rich you don’t have to save your half-smoked bowl, apparently.

Zayn isn’t the one you would have pegged to tuck you into bed, but when you get back into the suite, everyone else has holed up in their rooms. So he helps you unfold the pull-out couch and find where the bedclothes are hidden away. He even helps make the bed. He can do hospital corners. You’ve never met anybody under the age of fifty who could do hospital corners, much less someone who wants to do them when you’re going to be messing them up again in literally five minutes. When high.

“Hey,” you manage to say before he goes to bed, “thanks. I mean, I don’t think you really told me anything useful. But you tried. So thanks.”

He gives you that hundred-watt smile. “No problem, here all week,” he says.

Then he’s gone into his room, and it’s just you and a bottle of whiskey and a security guard standing watch outside the suite door all night.

As you drift off to sleep, you wonder what you’ll wake up to.

* * *

You wake up to Liam gently poking you in the shoulder. “Hey,” he says. “I thought you’d wanna wake up before the whole gang do.”

It takes you a moment to orient yourself. Suite. Party. Truth or Dare. Right. “Thanks,” you mumble, and flail for your phone—which isn’t there, of course; Christina still has it.

“I realized you wouldn’t have an alarm,” Liam says. “You drink tea? Or coffee?”

“Coffee,” you say. “Hey, you really _are_ Daddy Direction.”

Before it’s even out of your mouth, you know you shouldn’t have said that. It’s another reminder that you’re not one of the boys, not really. As if last night wasn’t enough of a reminder. You know terms like “Larry Stylinson” and “Daddy Direction” and you didn’t have to be told that Harry’s nickname is “Haz.” You know far, far more about them than they do about you, and some of what you think you know is probably wrong.

“Yeah,” Liam says. “Guess so.” He pads away to rummage through the kitchen cupboards.

“Let me make the coffee,” you offer, eyeing the fancy espresso machine on the counter. “I worked at Starbucks this summer.”

“Sure,” he says, locating the beans.

Liam watches as you turn on the machine to let it heat up, as you look for all the tools of the trade: grinder, filter, tamper, glass. There’s filtered water in the fridge, fortunately, and you pour yourself a glass as you go, realizing you desperately need water to counteract your incipient hangover. He seems entranced by the way you grind the beans, test them, tamp them. “Do you want me to teach you?” you offer.

“Nah, take me too long to figure it out, probably,” he says.

“Well, we’re gonna be stuck together awhile, I think,” you point out. “I bet we can get someone to let us use an espresso machine in every hotel.”

“The privilege of fame is getting to make your own coffee?”

“Hey, Starbucks is a good job!”

“Yap yap yap,” Zayn says, emerging from his room. He’s wearing SpongeBob pajama bottoms and looking really adorably tousled.

Holy shit, you realize, I’m waking up with One Direction. It’s like the morning after in some torrid fanfic! You freeze in the middle of pulling a shot. “Fuck!”

“Fuck the what?” Zayn says agreeably.

“Don’t interrupt! Barista at work!” Liam tells him.

“Ugh. The machine probably needed to be hotter anyway,” you mutter, throwing out the ruined espresso.

“Well I’ll be out having a fag, then,” Zayn says, and slips out to the balcony.

Liam sees the flicker on your face. “Sorry. Cigarette, he means.”

“I know what he means,” you tell him, “it just takes a second. Last time I heard that word, it was my younger brother being the biggest dickhead in the universe.”

“Must be nice having a younger brother,” Liam says. “I always wanted one.”

You make a face before you can stop yourself. “Nice is not the adjective I’d use to describe Jake. He’s a pain and a half.”

“But you love him, yeah?” He swings himself up to sit on the kitchen island.

“Yeah, I do. You want this shot?”

“Can you make it an americano?”

“Sure.” You add the hot water, ceremoniously hand it to him. “Anyway. I was saying. I love Jake. You can’t not love your brother. Like I said, though, sometimes he’s a dick. He says things just to rile me up, you know? Like he keeps going on about how he thinks Harry’s gay, just because he thinks I have a crush on him...”

There goes your mouth, running away with you again. Not what you had planned to talk to Liam about, not at all, not after last night, actually not at any time. You busy yourself with the espresso machine so you don’t have to see his reaction. It’s easy to lose yourself in the familiar motions.

“Everyone’s a dickhead sometimes,” Liam says, after a long silence.

“Yeah.” You risk a glance over your shoulder at him. He’s sipping his americano.

“You know, I think of the lads like my brothers,” he tells you, as you doctor your own espresso with a lot of sugar. You got used to drinking it straight when you had four AM shifts, but it gives you something to do with your hands. “They’re dickheads sometimes. All in different ways. I expect I am too. But I love them like brothers.”

“That’s good,” you say, finally turning around to face him. You lean against the counter, bracing yourself, letting it hold you up. You can feel he’s about to say something to you. It’s going to be something about how you’re not part of the group. Not yet. Maybe not ever. As if you don’t know.

“We have to build a lot of trust here. I’m just saying. You can’t expect to be let in on everything overnight.”

“I don’t.” The espresso is bitter in your mouth. “I just. Zayn told me about how protective Louis is, okay? I get it. And I get that you feel responsible for everyone. I just hope you’ll give me enough of a chance that I can prove to you I’m trustworthy. I wasn’t _trying_ to be a dickhead last night.”

“Here.” Liam holds up a hand. “I solemnly swear that I will give you a chance. I will try to help you out, and I will be less awful than your brother if I can possibly help it.”

You raise your hand, too. “I solemnly swear I’ll prove myself to you. And I’ll try not to be a dickhead going forward. I might not succeed, though.”

You shake on it, and you feel like you’re finally getting somewhere. You had Zayn in your corner last night, and now you’ve got Liam, too. You’re gonna do this. You’ll win over Niall, and Louis, and everything will be okay. It will.

* * *

There are two more show days, two more travel days, and one rest day before you get to Boston, and you decide you’re going to make the most of them.

You borrow _Pale Fire_ from Zayn and start trying to reread it on the first travel day, letting the boys play video games to their hearts’ content. You imagine it written out on index cards, like the book says. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane. I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.”

When you get to the next hotel, you hunt down an espresso machine with Liam and begin to teach him how to grind coffee beans just right. Niall gets interested and comes along, too, and he turns out to be pretty good at espresso-making and very good at distracting everybody from espresso-making with charmingly stupid pranks. You call Maddy and tell her all about these innocent pastimes and nothing about Relax Night. She points out that you’ve lost your Snapchat streak. You point out that you can’t exactly snap the boys, can you?

What you don’t do is spend much time with Harry, or try to convince Louis that you’re to be trusted. You tell yourself that it’s because you don’t want to risk getting too close. “Sisterly” is the word of the week.

Harry hasn’t gotten the message, though. You’re noodling around in the green room during sound check for the Philadelphia show when he sneaks up on you and plops himself down right next to you on the couch. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he observes.

“Nope,” you say.

“Yes you have,” he says, taking your phone out of your hands and putting it face-down on the coffee table with a firm click. “You can’t keep it up, you know.”

“Well, what should we do then? Other than sit here and talk about how I’m not supposed to avoid you?”

“FIFA?” he suggests, mock-seriously, then laughs at himself. Your heart nearly breaks at how sweet he is when he laughs, and you firmly push that feeling away, lock it up, reject it. Sisterly! Sisterly! Sisterly! “Look, I don’t know, I’m crap at this. Why don’t you come up on stage for a moment? I’ll show you how we do the show.”

He grabs your hand—how can he not see how much that freaks you out? But he and the boys always flop together in a big puppy pile, he’s obviously a tactile person, he’s been holding himself back for your comfort not his—and drags you through the corridors and into the wings.

From behind the backdrop you can see the lights blinking on and off, testing different functionalities. “You know we start back here,” he says, “and when the lights go out, there are little markers to help us find our way to our places. Then the spotlights come on Liam first...”

You’ve seen the way the show progresses, so you can envision it easily. The room is completely black, and then a pool of light illuminates Liam as he starts off singing alone. The other boys join him one by one, Zayn last, and they walk to the center of the stage, where their spotlights merge. The lights begin to come up as the song builds until the final chorus has the whole stage ablaze with neon.

You’ve seen the way the show progresses, but only from the audience. As you walk out, you realize the darkness must make it easier to see faces, not harder. The lights are so bright that you can barely make anything out. Past the first row, only a bright white sign would be visible. “Do you pick the people you’re going to say hi to while you’re standing in the dark? The people in the audience, I mean?” you ask Harry.

He looks at home on the stage in a way you know you don’t. “Sure,” he says. “I go, That girl’s fit. That girl’s _well_ fit.”

You’re shocked. Then you punch him in the arm. “You do not!”

“Sometimes,” he says. “Mostly I go, That girl’s tall enough she won’t be awkward to sing to. That girl looks like she wants to climb the barricade, don’t go near her. Security hates it when someone tries to rush the stage.”

“Always girls,” you say.

“Always girls, yeah. ‘Cept sometimes there’s a dad or two.”

“You sing to them, since they’re taller?”

And that night, during the show, you watch as he picks out one of the dads who love their daughters enough to come to a One Direction show and stand in the front row with them, and he sings directly at him for a full verse of “Diana.”

* * *

The next show is in Buffalo. It’s a six hour drive to get there, and just like last time you tried this, you peter out on _Pale Fire_ the instant the “Commentary” section starts. Zayn brought along other books, but they’re all cyberpunk things like _The Diamond Age_ and _Neuromancer_ and you don’t care about dudes being hackers. So Harry teaches you to knit as you both watch Niall play _Dragon Age: Inquisition._ Niall’s character is some sort of big orc-thing and every once in a while the game glitches because the character’s too tall.

“So you’re compensating for something,” Harry declares, the fifth time it happens.

“Not compensating. Expressin’ myself, man!”

“Your dick is so big it made your avatar big?” you ask.

“About this big,” Harry measures out about two inches on his knitting needle. Niall reaches over you to thwack Harry on the head with the PS4 controller. Harry waits till Niall has gone back to killing bears with his magic staff, then says, “you’ll notice he didn’t deny it.”

“Wanker!” Niall mutters.

“You see,” Harry goes on, grinning, “we had these showers on _The X-Factor..._ ”

“You writing fanfiction now, mate?” Zayn asks, not looking up from his book.

“Just explaining how I know all about little Niallers,” Harry starts, but Niall flings himself over you to give him an enthusiastic noogie. Harry shoves his knitting into your hands, maybe so he doesn’t poke anyone’s eye out, and they tumble over the back of the couch in a yelping tangle.

“Well, now you know what they’re really like,” Zayn tells you.

“Wanker!” Niall wails from the floor, over sounds of carnage coming from the PS4. “No fair going for the bollocks!”

“Your orc is getting eaten by a bear,” you inform him, collapsing into laughter.

* * *

As you roll into Buffalo, you realize there are girls lined upon the sidewalk to greet you.

Usually as you drive the window shades stay closed, cutting you off from the passing countryside. It’s easier that way, Liam says: you don’t get carsick. But today you’re feeling hemmed in, so you pull the curtain and peep.

Liam joins you at the window as you goggle at the signs and flowers and cameras they’re waving. “Right. No back-of-house here,” he mutters.

“What?”

Louis, drinking a soda at the banquette, looks weary. “Yeah, Christina said so. There’s no way for us to get this big bus into the parking garage. So it’s the gauntlet for us, lads.”

“No,” Harry declares. “That’s _not_ the mood we’re going to be in.”

“He’s right,” Niall says. “Let’s go make some girl’s day!”

“Make her _life_ ,” you correct. “You guys have no idea how much it means to the fans. No idea.”

“We’ve got some idea,” Louis says.

“It’s easy to get grouchy about not being able to breathe without someone taking fifteen photos,” Liam says. “But we wanted this. I suppose.”

“And we’re gonna give our fans the best One Direction moment they can have,” Harry says.

There’s a knock at the door. It’s the security guard saying it’s safe to exit.

“Well,” Zayn says, closing his book and tucking it in his duffel, “shall we?” He pins that brilliant smile to his face, and out they go.

You were worried about being seen getting out of the bus with them, but you shouldn’t have been. Nobody in that crowd pays the slightest bit of attention to you. All they want is Harry, Louis, Liam, Zayn and Niall, together, separately, touching their hands, accepting gifts, saying hello, letting them take a selfie. It’s boggling.

“How does it feel being on this side of the rope?” Christina asks you. You hadn’t even seen her come up.

“Weird,” you say. “Lucky. Exhilarated.”

Christina looks around to make sure nobody is near and pitches her voice low. “I’m going to need you to remember how it felt to be in that crowd,” "Everything the boys do is entertainment. Everything they do in public is a play. And you're about to enter stage right, and you're going to be the avatar for all those girls out there."

You look at the line of faces, universally excited, some happy, some sad that the boys aren't near them, some streaming with tears of joy or frustration. You think about Harry and Niall wrestling over _Dragon Age: Inquisition_ just a couple feet from you in the tour bus. "I feel guilty," you admit. "I know why you picked me, but I don't feel like I deserve it." It's only after you say the words that you realize they have a double meaning: you don't deserve the privilege of being part of the boys' entourage, but you don't deserve the torture of being so close to Harry, either. So close and yet so far.

“It doesn’t matter whether you deserve it or not,” Christina tells you, taking your arm and leading you into the hotel. “What matters is that you remember what it felt like to be on the other side of that rope. So you can give them a fantasy to believe in. You play that part, and we’ll be golden.” She pats your hand. “So when we do the show, I want you down in the pit this time, not in the VIP section. Talk to some fans. Okay?”

When she says it, it seems reasonable. The next day, though, when you’re down in the front row being crushed against the barricade by thousands of excited girls, it seems way less reasonable. You already feel like you’re in a different world from these fans. You were so excited when 1D was coming to town. Was that really less than a week ago?

As you wait for the show to start, you send Maddy a pic.

> Me (8:58 PM) sending you love from the front row!!!

“Will you take one of us?” the girl next to you asks. “They took away my selfie stick!”

You agree, and she hands over her phone to let you take a picture of her and her friends. One of them holds up a sign saying BROKE UP WITH MY BF CAUSE HE DIDN’T WANNA SEE 1D. “Did you really?” you ask.

The girl holding the sign looks a little abashed. “Pretty much,” she says.

“She was already going to break up with him,” her friend informs you as you give her back her phone. “It was just the last straw.”

“Which one’s your favorite?” you ask.

“Zayn!!” she squeals.

“Niall for me,” the girl holding up the sign says. “The _accent._ ”

“But Zayn’s so broody...”

“Well, I didn’t say I wouldn’t hook up with him!”

You laugh. They sound exactly like you and Maddy used to. She’s texted you back:

> Maddy (9:00 PM) u talking to me now?

Huh.

> Me (9:01 PM) ????

> Maddy (9:02 PM) busy with school also u never text  
>  Maddy (9:02 PM) thought maybe u were too cool for me now lol

> Me (9:03 PM) i’m not allowed to mostly  
>  Me (9:03 PM) also aren’t i gonna see u in like two days in boston

That’s a nicer way of saying “and aren’t I the whole reason you’re seeing 1D again, and from the VIP area, so why are you being like that?”

“Are you here on your own?” the girl with the sign asks you. “I’m Ella!”

You introduce yourself around and pretty soon you’re all laughing together, even when people are pushing you from behind. Even though your feet are already hurting from standing so long, it feels good. And just as the lights blink to say the show’s about to start, Maddy texts you back:

> Maddy (9:10 PM) no. sorry. I was being a bitch.  
>  Maddy (9:11 PM) Just jealous I guess.

> Me (9:12 PM) it’s ok, you don’t have to be jealous tho. 2 days till 1d backstage time yeah???

> Maddy (9:13 PM) I don’t deserve u <3

So, when the lights finally go out, you feel like all’s right with the world.

Tonight, the show is magical. It’s something about being in the heart of the crowd, feeling the weight of people all around you. The energy radiates off of them in a way you never felt in the VIP area. Everyone is so happy to be here. Even the boys are happy to be on stage. You can really believe that, watching them bounce around, watching Liam blow the prescribed number of kisses to the prescribed number of girls.

And so towards the end of the night, when they come out for an encore, you’re as electrified as Ella and her friends when they sing a surprise cover, one you’ve never heard them sing before, not even on the tour bus. The crowd knows the song. Everyone’s hollering along, and you are too.

“Oh don’t you dare look back, just keep your eyes on me. I said you’re holding back, she said shut up and dance with me!”

And you’re dancing, Ella’s dancing, the dads are dancing, the moms are dancing, the boys are dancing. Zayn’s doing a stupid little hip-hop move. Niall’s trying to jig. Louis and Liam are shimmying their nonexistent boobs at each other. And Harry is bounding across the stage like a deer, just soaking in the adoration as he sings.

Then he drops to his knees on the stage. Right in front of you.

“Don’t you dare look back,” he sings, and reaches out to grab your flailing hand, entwining his fingers in yours. “Keep your eyes on me.”

And you are. You’re stock still as Ella tries to reach over you, desperately trying to touch Harry’s sleeve. You’re totally frozen by the sudden, electric contact of his hand and yours. It’s like he’s at the barrier between fantasy and reality and he’s trying to pull you across with him.

“I said, you’re holding back,” he sings, pulling you up to teeter on your tiptoes over the barricade, “she said—“ and he shoves the mic into your face just in time for you to yell, “SHUT UP AND DANCE WITH ME!”

“This woman is my destiny!” he sings, pointing at you as he gets to his feet to finish the song. His hair is falling in his face, and you know he can’t see almost anything through the glare of the lights, but you also know that he _can_ see you. “She said, oh, oh! Shut up and dance with me!”

What does he read in your face?

You know that Christina or somebody told him to sing this song to you. You know it’s all part of the play, all part of the show. But nobody told you to expect it. All you can hear is the rush of adrenaline in your ears as the song and the noise of the crowd and Ella and her friends’ excitement wash over you.

* * *

Your heart’s still beating fast after the boys have left the stage and the arena is beginning to empty. Ella asks for your Insta handle and you give it to her. Then one of the security guards takes your elbow, and you’re being escorted away from her and her friends, led back down to the green room. There’s no VIPs coming with you this time.

“Okay, whose idea was that?” you manage to ask, as soon as the door closes.

“What idea?” Harry does his best angelic face.

“You know what idea!”

“That was me,” Christina says, brandishing her phone. “Take a look at this!”

Ella’s already posted a picture, tagging you and the official One Direction account. You hadn’t even noticed her taking it. It’s of Harry singing to you. His face fills the top left corner and yours the bottom right. They’re mirrors of each other, intense, hopeful.

“It’s _perfect_ ,” Christina sighs.

Your stomach sinks.

“Ya really do look like you’re about to snog her,” Niall says, grabbing the phone from Christina.

“Maybe I was,” Harry replies, and your stomach sinks even further.

“You’re not going to repost that, are you?” you ask, even though it’s a faint hope.

“That’s the whole point,” Christina tells you, swatting Niall on the back of the head and taking her phone back. “I won’t tag you, though. I wish you hadn’t told this Ella girl your Instagram.”

“She was nice,” you say.

Christina pauses in the midst of composing a post to just look at you.

“My account’s private?” you sally.

“Dame. That’s not going to help,” Liam says. “You’re about to get about a million friend requests. Just ignore it, that’s what I do.”

“That’s why you don’t have my legions of adoring fans, mate,” Niall tells him. “You gotta reach out to them. Say hello. Let them see the real you. Right, Christina?”

“Shaddap,” Liam says, “we did that plenty in the past and look where it got us.”

“On an international feckin’ tour!”

“Too late for second thoughts,” Christina announces. “It’s posted.”

You bite your lips. You got yourself into this, and whatever happens, you know you can’t blame anyone else. But if you’re truthful with yourself, it’s not the coming social media storm that’s bothering you. You had a little foretaste of that when Harry commented on your selfie, and it wasn’t that bad. What’s bothering you is the fakeness of the whole thing.

When you agreed to all this, it seemed much less like lying.

The worst part is, _is_ it lying? Harry kissed you on Relax Night, when there was nobody around to see but the other boys. You didn’t dream that. He enjoyed it and so did you. You didn’t dream that either. He says things like “maybe I _was_ about to snog her,” and you don’t know whether it’s just flirty-old-Haz, or whether it’s the truth, and you have absolutely no way to find out, because whether it’s true or not you’re going to have to pretend it’s true for the rest of forever.

You’re never, ever going to find out.

You only realize the room’s gone quiet when your phone rings really, really loudly.

“Your ringtone is ‘Steal My Girl’?” Louis asks, incredulous.

“It’s the acoustic version!” As if that mattered.

“I sound good on that!” Zayn says.

You turn and leave the room before Christina can volunteer her opinion, picking up without even looking at who it is.

“OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD.”

Of course it’s Maddy. She has her phone set to notify her whenever one of the official 1D accounts posts anything. “Hello to you too,” you say. “How’s MIT?”

“NOT AS INTERESTING AS YOUR LIFE,” she says. “WHAT ABOUT HARRY.”

“If you don’t tell me about MIT I’m not going to tell you what happened.” Swaggy’s going by with a load of t-shirts on a dolly. He makes a ridiculous face as he goes by. You nearly manage to smile back.

“Fewer nerds than expected!” Maddy says. “I took a math diagnostic! It was hard! TELL ME EVERYTHING.”

You let yourself slump down the cinderblock wall of the hallway. “It’s not what it looks like,” you tell her. “A couple days ago, we were talking about how he picks people to interact with during the show. It was your fault, you asked me about it, remember?”

Maddy does not sound convinced. “Right, so he decided to plant a big smackeroonie on you in the middle of Buffalo?”

“It just looks like that! Honestly, we looked like that for maybe half a second. The picture was just of a weird moment. He was singing.”

You close your eyes and you can envision Maddy’s expression. “GIRL. You are an IDIOT.”

“You’ll see for yourself when we come to Boston,” you insist. “There’s absolutely nothing going on between Harry and me.”

“Nooooooothing. You’ve been living on a tour bus with him, oh, and the rest of the band, and you’ve never even played Truth or Dare and gotten a sexy dare...”

Holy shit. You know it was a shot in the dark—Maddy doesn’t have ESP, just good timing and good instincts—but holy shit. “No!” you insist. “I have never done anything remotely romantic or sexual with Harry Styles! I don’t want to anymore! In fact, Harry is a complete and total asshole, okay? I wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole if you paid me a million dollars.”

And of course that’s the moment the green room door opens. And of course it’s Harry, coming to check if you’re all right.

* * *

The next morning you still feel bad about what you said to Maddy.

Harry acted like it was OK. After a moment of shock you put the phone on mutea nd said “Sorry! She was getting really nosy!” and he said “Yeah, got it” and went back into the green room, and you told Maddy you had to go and ran to apologize, and he accepted the apology, and that was supposed to be that.

You still feel bad, though. Either he thinks you were telling Maddy the truth, in which case you’re going to back out on the whole job but just haven’t told anyone yet, _and_ in which case you find him personally revolting. Or, he thinks you’re the kind of person who would lie to your best friend for the sake of some random famous dude who isn’t even really interested in you, probably.

The sad thing is, if he thinks the second thing, he’s right.

You feel even worse when you find out Harry’s not going to take advantage of your free day in Buffalo. Christina did some fancy footwork to trick the world into thinking you traveled directly on to Boston, so the whole band is practically guaranteed the chance to walk around like normal human beings. You’ve only been with the tour for a week; you can’t imagine how they must feel, constantly trapped in buses and hotels and stadiums, never getting to see the sky.

But Niall’s the only one who turns up to meet Christina in the morning, and he brings excuses from everyone else in the band. Zayn wants to Skype with Perrie. Liam wants to call his family and catch up on sleep. Louis thinks that Buffalo has (Niall quotes) “shite-all to do, so why would we want to go out when we can enjoy this lovely hotel, same as the last hotel.” And Harry just says he’s not coming.

So you and Niall take the drive out to Niagara Falls together, ride the Maid of the Mist, get completely soaked and give everyone on the ferry a heart attack by pretending to jump over the railing for a swim. Then Vinnie-the-bodyguard takes a cheerful photo of you trying to carry Niall piggy-back up some stairs (“Are you made of rocks? What did you eat this morning?! Seriously, you are _so_ fat, Horan”) and together you call Jake and laugh at him for being stuck in school (Niall makes up a stupid little song about never ever having to take a test again—he really should leave the songwriting to Liam and Louis) and only one person asks for Niall’s autograph. You’ve even got some cash for the gift shop, although it feels like a kid’s allowance, the way Christina doled it out.

“I think Zayn needs this,” Niall informs you, holding up something cross-stitched with a view of the falls.

“What even is that?”

“A phone pouch! See, you carry it round your neck like this, and then the whole world can see that someone who loves you went to Niagara Falls.”

“Could it be...seapunk?” you offer. “He might actually think that’s cool. It’s just stupid enough to be cool. This, on the other hand...” You hold up a t-shirt that looks like something Abercrombie & Fitch made circa 2003.

“Now, that’s the gift for Liam, right there. He might even choose to wear it a’purpose,” Niall says. “Don’t you know you should always buy gifts with the recipient in mind? Take into account their tastes and all. For instance, I happen to know that Louis’ taste runs to keychains. Millions of little keychains with nature scenes on them.” He puts one on every finger and waggles them at me. “We’ll put one on every zipper of his backpack, and one on his duffel, and one on his leather jacket, and someday in about five years he’ll find the last one and shout, ‘DAMN YOU NIALL HORAN!’”

“And you’ll be where, Tahiti?”

Niall grins. “Or just on the other end of the stage, runnin’ for m’life.”

“What should we get for Harry?” you ask.

Niall cocks his head. “We, or you?”

“Am I that obvious?”

“By the time I notice, darlin’, you’re obvious.”

Shit. “It’s just that I was kind of a jerk to him the other day...”

“I know.” Niall puts his hands on top of a rack of t-shirts, bracing himself. “Harry told us. About fifty times.”

You smack your forehead with the palm of your hand. “I am such an idiot.”

“No, don’t do that!” He grabs your wrist to make you stop. “Look, Harry likes you, see? He likes you a lot. That’s why he’s being a pillock.”

“Oh, because we’re five years old, and we can’t actually talk to each other?”

“Ya really asking for relationship advice from me? Yeh’d be better off askin’ a five year old,” he says, smiling. “Look, don’t hit yourself, even as a joke, okay? It bugs me.”

You want to ask why, but something tells you not to. Instead you say, “Zayn thinks that’s why Louis doesn’t like me, either.”

“Oh, Louis likes you,” Niall says, handing you the t-shirt for Liam and piling on all the rest of the Niagara Falls tchotchkes. “He doesn’t want to, but he likes you. Stop overthinking everything. You’re being a girl.”

“I am a girl!” you protest, following him to the cashier.

“And there’s your problem,” he says. “A terminal case of cooties.”

* * *

Amazingly, everyone seems to be in a good mood the next morning. That’s important, because it’s time to drive to Boston, and Boston will be the first time you publicly go out with the boys. You aren’t sure you could have dealt with grouchy Louis, upset Harry, Zayn pining for Perrie, _and_ the long drive _and_ your nerves.

For once, Christina rides in the bus, too. She commandeers the dinette to lay out the plan of attack. Liam and Louis lounge on the couch, playing FIFA and surreptitiously listening in. Zayn and Niall hotbox the bunks. Apparently Christina has decided that it’s not worth the argument, because she studiously pretends the bus doesn’t reek of weed.

The summary of the plan is this: Boston is going to be a carefully uncoordinated romp. The paparazzi won’t be tipped off to anything, and a security detail will follow your movements, but otherwise, you’ll pretty much be on your own. Maddy will come to the concert—alone—and then you’ll sneak out of the venue withher and go wherever the party is. Or wherever you want to.

“There’ll probably be paps at some point, right?” Liam asks from the couch.

“It depends on what you do,” Christina says. “If they don’t show up, I’ll be relying on you all to post pictures on social media. So take them. _Casual_ pics, please.”

“Gotta get some good shots of the dame,” Louis says, “gotta make it all look really real, don’t we?”

“I hope the party will be real enough,” Harry says. “I’m sick of Relax Nights!”

You laugh. “Don’t worry about that. Maddy will have, like, five different possible parties to go to. And her sister goes to BU, so it won’t be all MIT people either, if you don’t feel like hanging out with literal rocket scientists.”

“And that’s all fine as long as they’re not too wild,” Christina says. “Look at me, Harry. Pay attention. This is a chance for you all to have some freedom. Don’t fuck it up. You know what we talked about with Rich.” She turns her gaze theatrically around the bus to lock eyes with Liam and Louis. You don’t ask who Rich is.

“Yes, ma’am,” Harry says. “Can’t guarantee we won’t drink, but from cups only...”

“…and I’ll wipe my arse and wash behind my ears and be home by bedtime,” Louis adds, with a smirk.

But you’re really not sure they’re going to be able to keep their word on that. You know Maddy, and the moment you see her being escorted backstage at Gillette Stadium, youknow she’s got everything all figured out. She’s not overdressed—just jeans and a cute top, like you—but you can tell from the fact that she’s done a full contour that she’s thought about exactly what is going to go down tonight.

It only takes you about a millisecond to come to that conclusion, and it’s a good thing, because another millisecond later she’s barreled into you at top speed. “I MISSED YOU!”

“You, too!”

You hadn’t really realized how much that was true till just now. The long trips on the tour bus might be boring, but the newness of traveling with One Direction hasn’t worn off yet. It might never wear off, you’re realizing. Every time your mind wandered, there was Zayn smoking an ill-advised cigarette or Liam trying to work out a rhyme for a song, and you’d be distracted from thoughts of home.

But now that Maddy’s here, you realize there’s been a hole in your heart the whole time. Just seeing her makes you feel better.

“Ohmygod Zayn, what’d you do to your hair?” she squeaks as she lets you go.

Zayn awkwardly runs his hand over his scalp. He’d asked Lou-the-hair-and-makeup-gal to trim it higher and tighter than usual. “Felt like a change.”

“Sexy,” Maddy passes judgment.

“No, that’s you, love,” Louis tells her, winking shamelessly. She squeezes her left hand into a fist. You know her too well: she might seem confident, but that’s her nervous tic.

“Let’s go let the boys get ready,” you say. “We’ll hang out after the concert.”

“Great,” Maddy says, and follows you out of the green room. As soon as you’re in the hall, she grabs your arm. “Stop. Now we _have_ to talk.”

“No we don’t,” you say. “You have to tell me about college.”

She pouts, but gives in, explaining things as you walk out into the stadium. As she tells you about her schedule, about how she’s taking Physics and Chemistry and Introduction to Media Studies for her writing requirement, you can’t help but feel a twinge of…what? Envy? Surely not regret? A month ago you thought you’d be ensconced in your dorm room by now, meeting your roommate, going to classes. It’s not so much that you’d change places with Maddy as that you wish you could take both paths at once, starting college _and_ traveling with 1D.

“Do you think I made the right choice?” you ask her, out of the blue.

“What?”

“To do all this,” you say. “I mean, I don’t think I’m really learning anything. Not like you are.”

She looks at you like you’ve sprouted antennae. “Are you legitimately asking me that question right now? From the front row of the VIP section of a One Direction concert? You need to get your priorities straight!”

Maddy can always make you laugh. “Yeah, I know! It’s just a lot.”

“A lot of partying with the guys we’ve been SO into for our entire lives!”

“And a lot of other things too.”

“Oh, like that bullcrap about Harry being an asshole?” She isn’t being mean, just blunt.

You squirm. Of course she’d know you were lying about that. “I can’t talk about everything, okay? Not right now. Later tonight...”

“...when we’re not in a stadium full of crazed Directioners?” she finishes for you. “Yeah, okay.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to!” you insist. “You’re right. What I said to you on the phone wasn’t really true. It’s just complicated, okay? It’s complicated with all the boys, and with Harry it’s extra complicated.”

She tosses her head regally. It’s amazing how imperious she can manage to look, given that she’s a foot shorter than you. “Show me a relationship that isn’t complicated, and I’ll show you a fake relationship,” she says.

You snort. “If you only knew…!”

* * *

“DANCING QUEEN!” Niall sings, shimmying. “YOUNG AN’ SWEET, ONLY SEVENTEEN!”

He’s singing along with music floating out of a third-story dormitory window. There’s a party going on inside involving a disco ball and era-appropriate music. He’s a little high with being allowed out, free, not even a single bodyguard—well, okay, they’re following at a discreet distance in a black SUV, but it’s almost the same thing.

“We should crash that party,” Louis says.

“We should crash every party,” Niall says.

“No!” Maddy says. “We’re going to Mofo’s party. It’s not that far. If I can walk it in girl shoes, you can do it in yours.”

“How is your sister even named ‘Mofo’?” Niall asks, distracted from ABBA. “Is she just the most badass motherfucker?” His attempt at an American accent is actually pretty good.

“It’s short for Mofoluwakemi,” Maddy says. “She got the name nobody could pronounce, I got ‘Madison.’”

Zayn laughs. “My sisters would feel her to their bones.”

Then Harry stops in his tracks. “Oh, wow.”

Maddy’s been leading you out of the MIT campus to the banks of the Charles river, and all of a sudden the skyline of Boston is before you, lit up against the clear September night. You can’t identify any of the buildings—you’ve only been to Boston once, on a college visit—but it doesn’t matter. They’re gorgeous.

“Yeah, the view from my dorm is totally shitty,” Maddy says.

The party, it turns out, is in one of the brick houses lining the Boston bank of the river, and the place is really, really nice. Maddy keeps up a patter about it as you climb the stairs—back in her freshman year, Mofo made friends with the only other kid she could find who spoke Yoruba, and that kid turned out to be from a fancy Nollywood family, and…

All her explanations are lost when you open the front door. It’s a _rager._ “Is that Ice Prince?” Zayn asks, perking up, and rushes in to find whoever’s DJing.

“He’s such a fecking nerd!” Niall says. “Where’s the drinks?”

“We should meet our hostess first,” Liam scolds.

“Well, who’s to say we can’t do that with drinks in our hand? We came with her sister, after all, we can make ourselves comfortable if we have to...” Niall says, and then, “Oh hel- _lo_ , darlin’!”

That’s prompted by Mofo, appearing to welcome you all to her happy home. She looks like Maddy, only five inches taller and without the baby fat. You’re not surprised Niall is smitten.

Smitten, and moving fast. Several drinks later, Maddy is freaking out about the fact that her older sister appears to be well on her way to a one-night stand with Niall Horan, Liam is trying to tell her that he’d never let that happen, and you’re floating around lazily, enjoying the evening. Nobody’s figured out that the boys are One Direction—or anyway, nobody’s made an ass of themselves about it—and you’ve actually managed to relax.

Finished with your drink, you wander out onto the deck. There’s just one or two people out here, despite the view of Cambridge. The night’s a little chilly, and the whole living room’s clear for dancing. A glance back confirms it: Niall and Mofo are tearing it _up_.

“May I join you, milady?”

It’s Harry. He’s got a cup in each hand, and they’re filled with something suspiciously amber. “Only if you give me one of those and tell me what’s in it.”

“Uh, applejack and maple syrup, I think?” He shrugs. “American settlers used to drink it or something. I think your friend’s roommate’s a history major.”

You’ve never heard of applejack, except Apple Jacks the cereal, but you take a taste. It’s delightful. “That’s dangerous!”

“Very autumnal, innit? Like the Pumpkin Spice latte of booze.”

“How much have you had?”

He does an amazing whole-body shrug. “Plenty. Lost count. Who cares?”

“Well, thanks.”

“I figured, you probably needed a little more lubrication, yeah?”

You aren’t at all sure about that. Maybe it’s the setting, out among normal people who don’t care about the biggest band on the planet, but you’re feeling too relaxed, probably. “I”m having a good time,” you say. “It’s fun to be out with Maddy. Just like high school.”

You both look back through the vast windows, in to the party. Maddy’s given up kvetching with Liam and is now dancing with Louis. Actually, _grinding_ with Louis. “They’re cute,” you say. “That’ll take her mind off Niall and Mofo, maybe.”

“I don’t think Lou’s serious,” Harry says, and turns back to look at the river and town beyond. “Anyway, none of us are spending the night.”

“Gotta keep your nose clean and tween fans happy.”

Harry looks over at you, and for a moment you think he’s about to say something serious, though you can’t imagine what. The moment passes. Instead, he grins a slow, lazy, wicked grin. A panty-melter grin, you would’ve told Maddy, if you had seen it before you knew him, “You wanna get into trouble?”

You bite your lips.

“Oh, yeah, you do wanna get into trouble,” he says, laughing. “C’mon. Let’s ditch these berks.” He grabs your hand and before you know it he’s pulling you inside, through the party. Maddy’s dancing with Liam now, and she doesn’t even notice as Harry collars Louis and drags him with. You protest, but Harry doesn’t listen, and somewhere in the back of your addled brain you decide you don’t care.

“I’m your third wheel, am I?” Lou asks as he follows you both down the stairs.

“You’re a very important wheel, Louis, you’re the wheel that can buy alcohol,” Harry tells him seriously.

“And the wheel that’s holding the weed, too?”

“And that. I knew you’d understand!” He tousles Louis’ hair as we precede him into the street, into the night. “It’s not like there’s any aspect of you that I like, you know, other than your age…”

“Well, there’s his beauty,” you say.

“Yes, and your beauty,” Harry continues, without skipping a beat. “And your guitar-playing, and your singing, and really, you’re altogether a lovely man, so why don’t you stop saying you’re the third wheel?”

For the first time, Louis seems like a real person to you, because in this drunken moment he’s obviously just as snowed by Harry as you are. All he can say is “Sure, mate,” and off you go, headed for the river.

“So, what’s the plan?” you ask.

“Find ABBA!” Harry declares.

“And alcohol?”

“And alcohol!”

“You’d better go buy it,” you tell Louis, pointing towards a liquor store. “They’ll card us if we come with you.”

“Right,” Harry says wisely. “And then there’s CCTV.”

“SCANDAL: NEWS AT 11: HARRY STYLES, UNDERAGE, DRINKS CHEAP VODKA,” you intone.

“Oi! Tommo!” Halfway across the street already, Louis turns. “Don’t get cheap vodka, mate! You can afford the good stuff!” Harry turns to you, smug. “Harry Styles, underage, drinks expensive vodka,” he says, happily.

What Louis returns with isn’t vodka at all, though. It’s Goldschläger wrapped in a brown paper bag and a pack of cigarettes. He won’t let you touch it till you find a place to sit down, so you and Harry race across the bridge to the Cambridge side as he saunters lazily behind, smoking a cigarette.

“Unfair!” you’re wheezing, “I’m wearing sneaker-heels, not sneakers!” as Louis makes it to your side.

“Take a nip of this,” he suggests, handing you the paper bag.

The Goldschläger burns your throat as it goes down. Harry, childlike, demands his turn next, and eventually you all stagger to a park bench and sit down like winos, Louis on Harry’s right side, you on his left.

“My two favorite people,” Harry says, putting an arm around each of you.

“That’s not true,” Louis replies.

“Yeah,” you say, “I hardly know you. Zayn would be hurt, your mom, your dad, Christina...”

“My two favorite people,” he says decisively. “Because Louis is my favorite, and because you’re doing us such a big favor, so you’re my _favor_. Ite.”

“How much applejack did you have, mate?” Louis asks.

“Not too much,” Harry says. “Probably shouldn’t have any more, though. Don’t want to start getting sloppy. Goldschläger’s okay, though.”

“You might be sloppy already,” Lou says, doubtfully.

“I’ll have more, anyway,” you volunteer, as you feel Harry’s hand brush the bare skin of your neck and rest there.

“Right.” Lou hands the Goldschläger bottle over. “You know, I don’t see Andy?”

“We ditched him!” Harry says. “Y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to ditch Andy before?”

Louis looks horrified. “Hazza. That’s not good. What if someone showed up? Us without a bodyguard? You think the dame’s gonna protect us?”

But Harry’s not listening. He’s clearly enjoying himself way too much, long skinny legs sprawled out so far they’re almost pushing you and Louis off the bench, head tipped back to stare at the stars, fingers working at the knots in your neck. He’s working on Louis’ neck, too. He really is touchy feely.

“Maybe you should call?” you suggest.

“Good thought,” Louis says. “Cell phones. They exist. I’m daft. You’ll watch him? He’s more drunk than he thinks.”

You nod as Louis gets up and walks over to the riverside to make the call. It’s funny—it’s not like he needs to hide the conversation from you, and there’s nobody else anywhere near except a passel of cheerful MIT students wandering either to or from their dorm, across the street—but you’re glad of it, because it leaves you alone on the bench with Harry.

“Look up there with me,” Harry instructs you. He puts his hand to your head and pulls it down to his shoulder, so you don’t have any choice but to gaze up at the sky. “What’s up there?”

“No stars,” you say. It’s true: Boston’s lights are too bright for you to see anything in the sky at all.

“No stars,” Harry repeats. “That’s nice, yeah?”

“Sure,” you say. “I like stars better, I guess.”

He snickers. “Good thing, or you wouldn’t like me, would you?”

“I’d like you,” you say, truthfully. “I’d always like you.”

He turns his head just a fraction so that his curls spill over your face, almost like they did when you kissed. You can hardly breathe from his closeness, the warmth of his skin on yours. “I believe that,” he says quietly. “I’d like you too. I’m glad we like each other.”

A car whizzes by. It’s otherwise quiet. You close your eyes and savor the feeling.

“Andy’s on his way,” Lou says, breaking the moment. “Upsie-daisy, shall we, little Harrykins?”

You and Harry help each other up. You’re suddenly both unsteady on your feet. Lou puts himself between you, a solid anchor point in the shifting world, and keeps you more or less on track as the black car pulls up to the curb. He even hands you in after Harry. “Thanks,” he says in an undertone, as Harry bothers the driver to put on ABBA. “He’s not usually like this.”

“I’m not usually thisly, either,” you say. “I’m drunk. And if someone’s a third wheel it’s me. I know you don’t know me from Adam, or Annie, or some other person with an A name, and I respect you for not knowing me, and giving me your Goldschläger anyway, and trusting me with Harry because you take care of him...”

You’re not really making sense, but it doesn’t seem to matter. You’re being rewarded by the first smile Louis Tomlinson has ever given you.

As the driver turns up the music and Harry begins to sing along to “Take a Chance On Me,” you think: Maybe you’re making progress all around.

* * *

The next morning you wake up to the sun streaming in your hotel room window. For a moment you feel weightless, like you’re floating in a cloud, but it’s just the plush comforter and pillows and sheets, cocooning you in down and cotton.

There’s a lot of messages on your phone. You only look at the most important ones.

> Liam (1:30 AM) Hope you all got home OK, paps here now  
>  Liam (1:38 AM) Please text me back its important  
>  Liam (1:45 AM) Luigi txtd me its ok

Paparazzi? You tab over to the gossip sites. Yep: there’s plenty of shots of the building, and one of Liam and Maddy standing on the balcony, another of Liam, Niall and Zayn running the gauntlet to get to a waiting car. Nothing of Niall and Mofo, nothing too scandalous. There’s one picture of you and Harry, not a long-lens, something someone at the party took. You’re leaning on the balcony, holding your cups of liquor. Your faces are barely visible in the darkness, but it’s obvious you’re looking at each other.

In that picture, he had just asked you if you wanted to get into trouble.

Pushing away the emotions the picture stirs, you look at Maddy’s texts.

> Maddy (1:41 AM) whe re u a t  
>  Maddy (1:42 AM) whereuat  
>  Maddy (1:43 AM) FFFFFUUUUU AUTOCORRECT NOT WORKING BOO  
>  Maddy (1:44 AM) ibet ur fuckin hazzzzzzzzzzz

Then there’s a break. Evidently she slept.

> Maddy (11:07 AM) i feel like shit but if i don’t see you you’re gonna feel worse cuz i need deeeets  
>  Maddy (11:08 AM) hungover af  
>  Maddy (11:09 AM) kk just waiting 4 u with my head in this toilet

You sigh and, after getting yourself marginally clean, head out to find Christina. You spent a lot of time drunkenly staring at the ceiling last night, willing yourself to fall asleep, and you came to a conclusion. You have to tell Maddy what’s going on.

But Christina isn’t having it. She’s awake all right, and she’s already reviewed the previous night’s pictures, and apparently Lou and Liam filled her in on everything that went down. She’s also in a terrible mood because Niall really did have sex with Mofo last night, and she hasn’t been able to find out whether he used a condom or not. As far as you can tell that’s none of her business, but for your purposes all that matters is that she is on the warpath. When you ask about telling Maddy, her answer is “NO.”

“She can sign an NDA, though!”

Christina shuts her laptop with a snap. “And what happens when she breaks it and sells the story to _OK_?”

“You...sue her?”

“For what money?”

“For the money she wouldn’t have, because she wouldn’t break it?”

Christina’s lips compress into a thin line. “If I had a penny for every time I’d heard that…. The answer is no. I didn’t ever suggest that it would ever, ever, ever be all right to tell anyone, not at any point. Did I?”

You have to admit that she didn’t. But still! “It isn’t fair to me! You want me to play along. Well, I can’t, if I don’t have anyone to talk to about this. I’ll explode!”

“My answer is final,” she says, opening her laptop again in a clear dismissal.

“Harry’s your boss, right? He pays you?”

She looks up, suspicious. “Technically speaking, Modest Management pays me. I’m not Harry’s employee.”

“But he’s your boss. And if he says I’m allowed to tell Maddy...”

You turn on your heel and leave her room before she can say anything else. As you walk through the bland hotel hallway to Harry’s door, you text Maddy.

> Me (12:01 PM) brunch where

> Maddy (12:02 PM) trident cafe newbury street YAAAAAAS

You knock on Harry’s door.

From inside, an animal that might or might not be Harry Styles yowls incoherently. Andy comes running, braking hard when he sees it’s only you. “You gave me a heart attack there, missy!” he scolds.

“Is Harry OK?”

Andy knows the score. “Wishes he were dead, but he’ll be fine. He’s always like this. No stomach for it.”

You think back to all that applejack. Yep, sounds about right. “Do you think...”

Andy’s already shaking his head and moving between you and the door. “I can’t let you disturb him further.”

“HARRY!” you shout, but it’s no use. He must have his pillow over his head or something.

“He needs sleep,” Andy tells you. “He has to perform again soon. You can talk to him later.”

“But I need him now!”

“Too bad.”

So you have to go to brunch without a thing to say to Maddy. You’re dreading it all the way. There are fans in the lobby, and even though they don’t recognize you from last night’s pictures, their presence feels like surveillance.

But they don’t follow you out onto the street, and it’s a lovely morning, and that keeps you from turning around and going back upstairs and texting that you’re actually too hungover to eat after all. Maddy’s directed you to a cute café-slash-bookstore on the nicest shopping street in the city, and you wonder how she knew about it till you realize it must be Mofo’s influence. And that’s the first thing she says when you find her table: “Okay. So, Nofo.”

“Nofo?”

“Niall and Mofo!” She says it like, _obviously._

“All I know is, what happens in Boston stays in Boston,” you say, shaking your head. “Can I have some of your juice?”

She slides it over to you. It’s green and super-healthy and drinking it makes you feel magically better. “Well, I can tell you this: my sister has never ever had a one-night stand before...”

“I don’t think we really know that,” you interrupt.

“I do! She’s my sister!”

“But she’s been at college for three years! That’s a long time!”

“Anyways,” Maddy says huffily, “my point is that we need to figure out what Niall is planning on doing about this, because if he breaks her heart I’m going to stab him in the nuts.”

And just like that you’re off to the races, talking about Mofo’s romantic history and whether Niall is a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy and about what exactly went down (apparently a closet was involved—scandalous!). Most of you is right on the same page with your best friend, dissecting the night, telling her what happened after you and Lou and Harry left the party. She apologizes for teasing you about Harry so much and you say it’s okay. But there’s a part of you that’s relieved: relieved that she’s not asking you any questions you can’t answer.

It’s just a little distance between you and Maddy. Not so very much at all. But it’s only going to get worse from here, because the next tour stop is New York, and in New York you’re going to have your first official Harry date—the first date the paparazzi will be invited on.

When you part ways, you give Maddy a long hug. “I’m so happy for you, kiddo,” she tells you. “I’m sorry if I was ever a jerk about it. You deserve this, you know? You deserve everything.”

“You deserve everything, too,” you tell her.

“I’ve _got_ everything! I mean, as long as you keep inviting me to party with you!” You both laugh.

As she walks away, you feel the distance one more time, worse now because she was so sweet saying goodbye. It’s the tip of a wedge that’s going to drive you apart, you just know it, and you can’t stand for that. But you also can’t break your word to Harry.

* * *

The blue sky stretches infinitely out before you. Your New York hotel is the tallest building you’ve ever been in, and the band has taken the penthouse suite. Out its floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows you can see all of Manhattan stretching out beneath your feet, the buildings of midtown, the spire of One World Trade Center jutting up from the southern tip of the island. Across the water you can see other land, Brooklyn maybe. There are people down there, hundreds of feet below you, walking their dogs, going to work. Beneath the macadam of the streets there’s the subways, too, and catacombs of churches, and the pulsing arteries of sewers and water pipes. You’ve seen pictures of the great digging machines that are used to clear the way for those pipes. One of them might be directly beneath you right now, chewing through soil and stone. You press your hand to the glass, feeling suddenly lightheaded.

“Thinking of jumping?”

It’s Louis. How long was he creeping on you? “Naw,” you say.

“I would. If I were going to be thrown to the sharks,” he says. “Want a drink? Liquid courage?” He holds up a bottle of Cuervo.

You have twenty minutes before Harry is supposed to collect you for your first-ever date. “Christina wouldn’t like it,” you say, then, “but who the fuck cares, right?” Christina has scrupulously kept you away from Harry ever since you mentioned getting Maddy an NDA. She’s not your friend.

“That’s the spirit!” Louis says. You’re struck by how wicked he looks, his hooded eyes shining, his lips turned up in a smirk. He rifles through the cupboards for shot glasses. “So where are you going?”

“No idea,” you admit. “Nobody told me.”

“That’s stupid, isn’t it? What if it’s ice skating and you’re wearing a miniskirt?”

It surprises you that Louis would have any opinion on how you would dress. “Ice skating in September? I think Christina would have said something.” Louis is as short as a girl—he can barely reach the glasses. But he gets them and sets them up, one for you and one for him, across the kitchen island.

“You ever done a tequila shot, dame?” he asks.

You haven’t.

So he shows you how to wet your hand and pour salt on it, how to cut a lime into wedges the right way. It’s a strange mirror of your teaching Liam how to pull an espresso shot. When everything is ready, he raises his glass. “To Harry Styles,” he says.

“To Harry,” you echo, looking into his eyes. Then you lick your salt and take your shot.

It’s way grosser than whiskey.

“Try the lime,” Louis says, laughing at your expression. “Wipe the taste out of your mouth.”

“Ugh, how can you _like_ this?” you fume, sucking on the wedge.

“Point’s not to like it, point’s to get drunk!” He pours himself another. “Want to try again?”

“Are you corrupting my girlfriend, Louis?”

Your heart skips at the word “girlfriend,” even though you know it shouldn’t. Harry looks fabulous. He’s wearing black skinny jeans, black boots, a gauzy shirt unbuttoned partway, and his long hair is pulled back with a red bandanna. He doesn’t look like a pop star but like a rock star, like a young Mick Jagger, cocky and swaggering and able to have anybody he wants with a crook of his finger.

Then he pounces on Louis and wrestles the bottle out of his hand. “Not fair!” Lou protests, jumping up to try and reach it—in his boots Harry’s tall enough that he can’t touch it without a boost. “I’ll show you, Haz!” and he ploughs into him and propels him into the wall, pulling his arm down and the bottle away, doing a little victory dance.

Looking at the two of them together is almost too much. They’re such perfect friends. When it’s just one or the other, they’re handsome, untouchable. When they’re together they humanize each other. Seeing Harry interact with Louis, you know he’s just a guy, just another person like you.

That’s only an illusion, though. You know it’s not true when the car pulls out of the hotel’s garage far too slowly. Hands press against the tinted glass of the windows. They’re fans’ hands. Somehow they know that Harry is inside.

He takes you to a little restaurant near Central Park, helps you out of the car like a gentleman. You’re busy worrying about whether you’re making a stupid face or not, but there’s not a crush of paparazzi there. “Christina only tipped one of ‘em off,” Harry tells you, and points. There’s a man straddling a motorcycle across the street, holding the largest camera you’ve ever seen. He gives you a thumbs up. “The rest will follow, don’t worry.”

You’re seated in the window, and you notice your faces are framed but not obscured by the plants there. Someone’s thought of everything. “So what do we do now?” you ask.

“Act normal,” he says.

You don’t even know what normal is. You’re dolled up like you never would be under other circumstances, and there’s a guy taking photos of you through a restaurant window, and across the table from you is your forever crush who (by the way) is also internationally famous. And this isn’t a real date.

You try to sit up straight and look around the restaurant. It’s shabby-chic, farmhouse style, with weathered white wood and dried flowers. Not too fancy, not too casual. A board lists the local vegetables you can order, market-fresh. The whole farm-to-table thing must bolster Harry’s image somehow, in Christina’s opinion.

“Hey,” Harry says quietly. He takes your hand, and you realize you’ve been tapping your fingernail against your knife, a little nervous tic.

“For the cameras?” you ask.

“So you don’t drive me nuts with that tapping,” he says, smiling. His hand is large and warm and comforting. “Look, I want you to pretend. Let’s pretend this is all normal. We’re just on a date, yeah? Maybe it’s our first date. We met…”

“We met through Maddy,” you say. “But you have to let go of my hand. I wouldn’t hold hands with somebody right at the beginning of a first date.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Prissy girl, aren’t you? What else don’t you do?”

That gets you laughing, and soon the waitress comes, and it’s all okay. You spend the meal working out the details of your imaginary “first date”—you’re in New York as a tourist, he’s there for college at NYU; Maddy told him he’d like you because you’re so sensible, and he thought that wasn’t a good reason to date someone, but he agreed anyway; Maddy told you you’d like him because his hair is so fabulous, and you thought that wasn’t a good reason to date someone, but you agreed too.

By the time dessert comes, you order just one dish of ice cream to share between you, and you’re still holding hands on and off. He gets the check and helps you with your jacket, but as he wraps it around you, he pauses, hands on your shoulder. “Get ready,” he warns you, quietly in your ear so the servers can’t overhear, and you remember why you’re here. “They’re going to yell at you, say things to get you to react. Don’t react.”

“Okay,” you say.

There are a lot more paparazzi as you step out of the restaurant. Harry’s hand tightens around your shoulder and he helps you shield your face from the flashes, but it doesn’t make much of a difference, and you stumble on your high heels. “Chickie!” one of them yells at you. “Hey, chickie! Show us your tits!”

Harry’s head snaps up. “Who said that?” he asks. “Which one of you said that?”

And oh, the paparazzi love that. The cameras are flashing even more frantically now. Andy gets out of the car and comes around to push them back, but he can’t do much. To make things worse there’s a couple of girls in among them, and you realize the fans have been watching your date.

“Don’t speak that way to a lady, man,” Harry is scolding the paparazzo. “Do I know you? Is that Roger? Roger. You promised me you were going to be less rude, didn’t you?”

“Sorry, Harry!” the pap says. “I just had to get the shot, you know?”

“You don’t have to get it that badly, man. You’re never getting a shot again. You’re out from now on,” he says. “Go home.”

“C’mon,” you tell him, tugging on his hand as one of the girls worms her way up to the front and begs him for a selfie. “Let’s just go.” He comes with you, apologizing to the fans all the way, and then you’re in the car, moving slowly at first, then faster.

“I wish we could have stayed,” he says, obviously thinking of the fans. “But I’m sorry about it for you. They can be real jerks. I didn’t think they’d pull that stuff first time they saw you.”

“It’s all right,” you say, suddenly awkward, feeling like you take up too much space in the close confines of the car’s backseat.

“Do you want to be done?” he asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want to go back, be done with the date? The paps have enough shots, for sure.”

“Was there anything else planned?”

“Yeah,” he admits. “Something I’ve been wanting to do. But if you’re not up for it...”

His face is so hopeful that you can’t help but say, “Then I can deal with the paparazzi if you can.”

* * *

“So then,” Harry says, the slow cadence of his voice lending drama to the story, “she goes, well, it wasn’t _my_ fault, it was my brother! Because her brother was gay, y’see...”

“...and _he_ was the one obsessed with Niall?!” you finish, giggling.

“And then we couldn’t say no, right, so Niall had to go beg forgiveness...” Harry fumbles with the door to the penthouse suite.

It’s late. It’s actually _very_ late, because what Harry really wanted to do was see a movie. Specifically, a Hitchcock movie, in 35mm. You don’t really even know what that means except that it’s something he can’t do at home, even with his jillions of dollars, so you’re happy it makes him happy. It turns out he recently saw _Psycho_ and got completely obsessed, so now he’s trying to watch everything Hitchcock ever made.

You never would have seen this particular movie if not for Harry. It’s a psychological thriller called _Marnie,_ in black and white, and there’s a rape scene. Not exactly a date movie at all. But it’s really good and you were totally obsessed by the time it was done, and you got dessert part two (“if this were a civilized country we could get a drink,” Harry complains) and talked about it for what must have been at least an hour, even though the paparazzi were still hovering outside.

“Coming in late, are you? Having lo-o-oads of fun?”

The voice seems to come from nowhere. Then Louis sits up from where he was lying, hidden by the back of the couch.

“We saw _Marnie_!” you tell him, pleased he waited up. “Harry said you don’t like old movies but seriously, Louis, you missed something awesome...”

Louis snorts, propelling himself unsteadily to his feet. “Didn’t need to be the third wheel on your big date, did I?”

He’s drunk, you realize. The bottle of Cuervo’s almost empty on the end table, and there’s a distinct smell of weed in the air, too. “Never a third wheel,” Harry says lightly. “C’mon, let’s all do a shot together, yeah?”

“Harry’s been complaining nonstop about how dumb our liquor laws are,” you say, but Louis isn’t listening. He laughs, and it’s bitter.

“I’ve had enough, ta. I’m going to bed.”

You watch, dumbfounded, as he stumbles out of the room, leaving the bottle behind him. “What’s wrong with him?” you ask Harry.

He just shrugs and loosens the bandanna from around his hair in a gesture that you’re sure is intended to hedge against having to speak.

“Will you have a shot with me, anyway?” you suggest, even though you aren’t really looking forward to the taste of tequila again.

Harry’s smile is heartbreakingly lovely. “Sure, babe,” he says. You cut up the lime and prepare the salt on your hand as he pours. You’re all ready to go, but he stops you from drinking. “Me first.”

He takes the lime and holds it against your lips, rind-side in. “Hold that in your teeth for me.” Then, before you know what he’s doing, he licks the salt off your hand with his soft, warm tongue.

You watch, breathless, as he tips his head back and drinks the shot down—as he bends his head to yours and gently takes the lime out of your teeth with his own. It’s almost like the kiss you shared, but softer, more tantalizing.

“You now,” he says, drawing a line of salt along the blue veins of his forearm.

You can’t think; you can only obey. The salt overpowers any flavor his skin might have had, but the intimacy of the gesture is overwhelming. The tequila burns its way down, but even so, you have to steel yourself to take the lime from his lips. Its sourness momentarily distracts you from how very, very close you are.

“Here, now,” Harry says, and takes the lime from you with his long, beautiful fingers. You try to pull away, but his other arm twines around your waist and pulls you into his kiss.

You’re instantly lost, lost even before he boosts you up to sit on the counter, even before he takes your face in his hands and turns it so that he can kiss one, then the other of your cheeks. His lips are feather-light, not insistent in the least, but so sweet that you want to cry. He steps closer between your knees, pressing his cheek to your shoulder.

You think he’s seeking comfort, think that maybe this is all some sort of delayed reaction to the paparazzi and the date and that he doesn’t really mean any of it, think it’s just him being touchy feely and taking it far too far. But then he murmurs, “Tell me about all the things you don’t do on the first date?”

“What do you want to do on the first date?” you respond, amazed at your own cheekiness.

“Why don’t I show you?” he offers.

Then he’s helping you down and propelling you into his room, a sanctum you’ve never before violated, even in a hotel. His clothes are still packed away in a duffel bag, the mints still on the pillows, but nevertheless you know this is another barrier torn down, a real sign of trust.

He toes out of his shoes. He takes his shirt off, and you take yours off, alternating till you’re nearly naked. You aren’t even touching each other, aren’t talking about it, just acting. It’s incredibly tantalizing. It occurs to you that you probably should tell him that you’re a virgin—but you don’t, because that might make him stop. No, it _would_ make him stop. This is Harry, the world’s nicest person, the kindest boy you have ever known, and there is absolutely no way he would have sex with you now if he knew. He would say “oh” and maybe he would still do it, only later, with candles and roses and soft music. But probably he would just stop altogether and say that this was just a lark, that he wasn’t prepared to take that kind of responsibility. He’d be right to stop. It would be honorable.

His hands on your naked skin, pulling your panties down your legs, don’t make you feel very much like being honorable.

“You’re lovely,” he says, standing back, looking you up and down.

“So are you,” you say. And he is. He’s not built like an athlete, but he’s trim and beautiful, his legs almost girlish, his muscles defined beneath his skin from long hours and odd mealtimes on the road. You aren’t shy about your own nudity but you’re shy of his—you can hardly bring yourself to look down to his hips, his dick, but you’re intensely aware that it’s standing at attention, that he’s extraordinarily ready for you.

“All right, babe?” he asks as he comes to you, laying you back on the bed, pressing the length of his body against you. It’s all happening so quick now. “All right, babe?” he asks at every step, as he kisses your neck and throat and breasts, making you keen in appreciation. You don’t know what to do to make this go better, don’t know how to be a good partner, worry that you might embarrass yourself, but you’re willing to try, clumsily fumbling your hands down his taut belly, carefully touching the velvety head of his cock.

That makes him expel a quick hiss of breath, and you’re filled with confidence. You’re here. You’re the one in charge. He came to _you_ , not once but time and again. You’ve never had to do anything to seduce Harry Styles. He’s done it all, all along.

With that knowledge you’re free of all embarrassment. You can say what you’ve been thinking, what you’ve been feeling sine the first time he kissed you. “Do it,” you tell him, whispering along the line of his jaw. “I want you inside of me. I want to be all around you.”

“Christ,” he says, and lines himself up with your sodden entrance, and you brace yourself, teeth against the place where his shoulder meets his neck, to muffle any sounds you might make as he pushes in.

He’s so big it’s a miracle he fits, but he does, and there’s no pain—not like you’d feared, not like you’d heard. There’s only a sense of pressure, and a sense of urgency, and an overwhelming sense of closeness, of having actually achieved your goal of crawling into his skin, or him crawling into yours. “Harry,” you say, rolling your hips experimentally. “Harry...”

“Christ you’re tight,” he mutters, “you’re beautiful,” and you’re not sure how he can say that really because his eyes are shut as he moves. And moves, and moves, and you don’t think you’ve ever seen anything as gorgeous as Harry Styles when he comes.

It takes him a moment to realize that he’s been selfish. “Shite,” he says, flopping back on the bed, still leaking a little cum—it probably ought to seem gross but right now it’s honestly endearing, which sounds stupid even to you, but is true. “It ought to be ladies first.”

“It’s all right,” you giggle. You feel different, somehow, even though you and Maddy swore long ago that virginity was a stupid social construct that has nothing to do with your value as a human being.

“No, can’t get a bad reputation,” Harry yawns.

“You’ve already got one,” you point out, tracing a finger across the tattooed 17BLACK on his shoulder.

“Really?” he says. “You’ve been talking to my exes, have you?” And he reaches behind his head for a pillow and bops you in the face with it, grinning.

“Really!” you say, and grab the pillow from him, and retaliate.

There’s one thing you can say about all of this: even if you hadn’t signed an NDA, and even if you weren’t a good enough person to realize you should never sell your story to a tabloid, no gossip mag in the history of the universe would ever have believed that after taking your virginity, Harry Styles challenged you to a pillow fight—and lost.

* * *

You swim up through hazy layers of dream: Niall bending over you, then Zayn, then Liam, then Louis, then finally Harry, and you know it’s really Harry because in the dream you can smell his ineffable scent. You follow him through billowing white sheets, always just a hairsbreadth away, just out of your reach. He’s so beautiful, so fucking gorgeous, with miles of delicious tattooed skin for you to touch, and you’ve almost caught up with him. But you can hear voices. There’s someone else there. It’s Louis. He’s angry…

“Shut up, don’t wake her!” Harry hisses, speaking more quickly than you’ve ever heard him, and your eyes snap open.

You’re as mother-naked as you were when you went to sleep last night, under the pillowy white hotel comforter and at least two sheets. They’re covering you thoroughly, fortunately, because Louis is in the room. Not just at the door. In the actual room.

You had sex with Harry Styles last night, and he invited Louis into the room this morning?

Something warns you to keep quiet and still, and you do, and they keep talking, whispering now. “Fine then,” Louis is saying, “I’ll ask you again quieter this time, you fucking fucked her?”

“None of your business,” Harry says.

“She’s right there, you daft cunt!” Louis replies, and you can’t see his face without moving your head, so you can’t tell, but it sounds like he’s holding something back—some deep emotion, sorrow or anger or frustration—like he’s on the verge of a sob, but too determined to be a man to let it out. “She’s as naked as the day she was bloody born!”

“Mate, it’s none of your business,” Harry says again, this time weary, sick of the argument.

“It is my business. You know it’s my business. If you decide to fuck some whore it’s my business...”

“Don’t call her that.”

You almost get up and tell Louis to get out, but before you can, he backs down. “Fine, I’m sorry. But did you even use a fucking condom, mate, can you tell me that? Or are you as stupid as Niall?”

And that’s when Harry loses his temper. You’ve never seen him do it before. Yesterday with the photographer he was cross, but now he’s furious, and you can’t believe you didn’t see it coming, didn’t realize that what you had read as tiredness in his voice was actually bone-deep fury. “It’s none of your business,” he says, his voice rising to normal levels and beyond, as though he’s stopped caring whether you hear or wake up or not, “because you’ve never even fucking kissed me, do you know that? Because you’re so deep in the closet that you couldn’t find yourself with the entire bloody cast of Hoarders, and because you’re such a cowardly little pissant that you’ll let me give you a blowie but you won’t let me actually fucking care for you, and at some point I’ve gotten TIRED OF IT!”

You sit bolt upright, not caring about your nakedness, not caring about the fact that you’re supposedly asleep (though there’s no way anybody could sleep through Harry’s shouting, not in a million years), not caring about anything except _what the fuck did you just hear._ And as you do you see Louis smash his mouth against Harry’s in what looks like a parody of a kiss to begin with, but then his hands are in Harry’s hair, his fingers twisting it into knots as Harry bends down into him, as Harry holds his own hands stiff at his sides as though he doesn’t know what to do, and you can watch them teeter on their heels, pushing each other back and forth, until the fateful moment when Harry seems to make a decision and puts his arms around Louis’ waist and finally, finally truly kisses him back.

Harry’s big body wraps around Louis’ smaller form. You see how Harry responds to Louis, just as you responded to him last night: the sweet urgency as he opens his mouth and lets Louis in, lets him deep. How he mutters “Christ” into Louis’ mouth like he did last night. You see how he melts under Louis’ attentions, you see how his hips grind into Louis’…

You can’t process what you’re seeing. Part of you, maybe the same part that told you to stay quiet and still and listen to Louis and Harry’s conversation—that part knows all the pieces just fell into place, that now you understand why you had to be Harry’s fake girlfriend. To be his beard. Because he and Louis are in love, or are going to be, and every single person must know it but you.

But by far the greatest part of you is numb, on autopilot, and instead of saying anything to either Louis or Harry you simply get up, ignoring them entirely, and you pick up your clothes, and instead of putting them on, you wait for the boys to finish kissing. You’re like a doll sitting there, silent, you back carefully straight, your dress and bra and panties clutched in your lap.

“Lou,” Harry whispers when they finally break the kiss. You observe, almost clinically, that his eyes are glazed, his lips are swollen, he has a hickey rising where his shoulder meets his neck. He’s wearing boxers and nothing else. You gave him that hickey, not Louis. This is the order in which you realize these things: hickey, boxers, your role in the situation.

Your role. What you did last night.

And then Louis clocks you, sitting naked on the bed with your clothes in your hands. His eyes go wide. “Fuck,” he says, and Harry looks too. He glances at you once—is he embarrassed of you? Embarrassed of what he did, of what you did together?—and hides his face in Louis’ neck without a word.

“You don’t have to worry,” you find yourself saying, as though from very far away. Louis is staring at your tits. “You don’t need to worry at all. I was a virgin. So I don’t have any diseases.”

It’s satisfying to see Louis’ face change, to know that he believes you. To know that Harry believes you too, that he must know it’s true.

“I’m going to go now,” you say to them, standing up and pulling your dress over your head, not bothering with your underwear. “I’ll leave you two alone to work things out.” They stand, frozen, clearly at a loss for what to do.

You are beginning to identify the emotions you’re feeling. Anger is one of them. Shame is another. Humiliation. But also pride, because you are not going to let these two beautiful boys see you cry.

“Fuck you, Louis,” you say, as you push past them. “You didn’t have to do that in front of me. And Harry. Look at me.”

He does, with those stupid deep green wounded puppy dog eyes. He has the fucking _gall_ to look like he’s the one who’s been hurt. That, more than anything, puts the steel into your spine.

“You should have known better,” you tell him. “You should have known better, and you know it, and you should feel awful right now. Fuck you, Harry Styles.”

And then you sweep out of the room and walk, head held high, across the suite. Zayn and Liam and Niall are all sitting on the couch looking petrified. They’ve been listening the whole time, of course. You go into the guest bathroom. You close the door and lock it.

You look at yourself in the mirror. Your legs give out under you and suddenly you’re sitting on the floor, your back to the tub, and staring at your bare feet, very far away at the end of your legs.

You want to call your mother. No, that’s not a good idea. You want to call Maddy, but you can’t, because you left your phone in your purse in Harry’s room, and anyway it’s probably not charged. “Fuck,” you say out loud.

You never used to swear before you met the boys.

Then someone knocks. You know it’s Zayn, though you can’t say how: something about how tentative it is. Niall would just pound. Liam wouldn’t knock at all.

“You okay in there?”

You crawl across the floor to let him in. You can’t think of what else to do. Your things are packed, you could leave, could just walk right out in front of all the Directioners in the lobby, but even in your current incredibly confused state you know that’s a shitty idea, even worse than calling Mom. You should call Aunt Jo, that’s who you should call, she’s already under an NDA…

Zayn locks the door behind himself and sits down against it, putting himself on your level. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“What for,” you say reflexively, defensively.

He ducks his head. “For not telling you.”

You don’t say anything, just scoot your butt down so your neck’s pillowed against the tub and stare at the ceiling. Your dress rides up almost high enough that you’re flashing him. You wish you were the kind of cool girl who wouldn’t give a shit. You do give a shit. You tug it down.

“I really am sorry,” he says. “I’d say Harry made me keep it secret, but fuck, can’t blame it on him, can I?”

“Nope,” you say. Then you’re quiet again.

One thing Aunt Jo taught you is that if you’re quiet for long enough, people just sort of start saying things. They start spilling their guts, telling you whatever’s on their mind. It works best when emotions are running high already. She taught you: sit up straight. Become Rapunzel in her tower, become an ice queen, don’t let anyone reach you. Then they’ll tell you exactly what they’re thinking.

You haven’t always been so good at following that advice, but you do now, and Zayn doesn’t disappoint. He takes out a cigarette and lights it. You’re pretty sure that’s not allowed in hotel bathrooms, but you don’t say anything about it.

“Boys fuck around, yeah?” He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “ ‘s normal. Just a bit of fuckin’ laddy fun with the lads.” He’s snorting as he says it, as if even he knows how unconvincing it sounds. “Close quarters. Dormitories. All that.”

Girls don’t do that, you want to clarify for him, but you hold your tongue. Anyway, it’s not really true: it’s not as though you didn’t practice kissing with Maddy at least once.

“Thing is,” Zayn continues, “Harry’s always been comfortable with it, you know? From when he was this little baby he didn’t care about sex stuff. Just, hey, whatever you’re into, go for it. He doesn’t care what parts you have or don’t have. But that’s not what all of us are like. Any time I breathe I’ve got someone telling me I’m too Muslim or not Muslim enough or...”

You sure drink a lot for a nice Muslim boy, you want to say, but it’s too mean, and anyway you don’t want him to stop talking. If you were just able to wrap your head around this thing, whatever it is, maybe you could decide what to do.

“Point is, Harry fancied Louis. And Louis fancied Harry. But Louis didn’t want to fancy Harry.”

You finally have to speak. “Harry’s words were ‘you’re so deep in the closet the entire cast of _Hoarders_ couldn’t find you.”

Zayn stifles a smile. “Yeah, I think people in bloody China heard that. Point is, who knows what’s going on between those two? But nobody wants it to get out, see?”

You see.

You’ve _seen_ , really. Zayn is not saying anything new. The conversation that you and everyone else overheard made it abundantly clear what was going on. But what you don’t get, what you can’t reconcile, is how everything could change so quickly. Harry was _so_ into you. You’re sure of it. He had to be. He was breathless, impatient. His eyes were so green and so intense—he couldn’t even be bothered to get you off, he was so excited—he was so kind afterwards, so silly!

But even as you think about it you’re second-guessing. Maybe he wasn’t impatient, maybe he was trying to get it over with. Maybe he couldn’t take care of you because your lady bits disgusted him. Maybe he started the pillow fight as a way to get out of more sex, to get things back onto neutral ground. Maybe…

You can feel the cold ceramic of the tub against your neck, the stickiness on your thighs, the ache in your back from sitting in such an awkward position. Suddenly the world feels very real to you. You’re really here, you’re really not a virgin any more, and it’s really Harry Styles who did that.

And it’s Louis Tomlinson that Harry’s in love with, and Louis hates you, you’re sure of that by now.

You feel hot tears running down your face. When did you start crying?

“It’ll be alright,” Zayn tries to say, awkwardly patting your knee, but he doesn’t know what to do. He makes little gestures with his hands and then says, “hold on, can I get Liam?” and he unlocks the door and yells “LIAM,” who must’ve been standing eavesdropping because he comes in immediately and says “oh, love,” and steps over you and sits down next to you by the tub and pulls you into his lap.

When you’ve cried yourself out, you realize that you’ve left a huge snot stain on Liam’s shirt. “Sorry,” you mumble.

“It’s no big,” he tells you. “Better?”

“Yes,” you admit, sounding like a child even to yourself. “Only I think I really have to go home now.”

Zayn and Liam exchange a look. No, a Look. “I don’t think so,” Liam says, low, gentle.

“Why not? Nobody really wants me here, crying on the floor of a fucking bathroom, do they? Not now that Harry and Louis are all happy-couple.”

“Well, nobody else reads around here,” Zayn says.

“More to the point, they’re not all happy-couple,” Liam says. “About ten seconds after you went in here, Harry came out. In a bloody rage.”

“He bolted,” Zayn says.

“Harry left? Like, left the hotel?”

“Who knows?” Liam says. “Looked like it. He said not to expect him back.”

“Without Andy? Is he insane? Or stupid?”

“Stupid angry maybe,” Liam says, getting up now that you don’t need a pillow-slash-Kleenex. “Niall’s trying to get Louis to talk to him right now, but I don’t think he’ll be much help. So you can’t just go home. We need you to be normal for Harry and the paps.”

You stare down at the tile floor of the bathroom. There’s nothing to see in it. It’s absolutely regular, little squares one after another. “I have to call Aunt Jo,” you say.

“You can’t tell her about this,” Liam says earnestly. “I don’t think we should even tell Christina. We should just go on like nothing ever happened.”

As though that was a good policy! As though it were possible with Harry AWOL in Manhattan! But Liam and Zayn are so anxious you can’t just flatly refuse. “I don’t know,” you tell them, “I’m not promising anything. But I won’t go anywhere right away, and I won’t tell Christina right away. Okay?”

Their relief is obvious. “Thanks, dame,” Zayn says, and gives you a side-hug, just the way Jake always does. The nickname Louis gave you feels different now, but you can’t say quite how. “You won’t regret it.”

Yeah. You’re pretty sure he’s wrong.

* * *

> Please take care of our sweet boy :) you’re holding our whole world...but if he’s happy we’re happy <3

> YOU HURT HIM WE WILL KILL YOU #DIRECTIONERSWANTUDEAD

> click here to sign a petition for Harry to stop dating the troll!!!!

> she is #goals but only because of harry let’s be honest she’s not that pretty but w/e

Christina is making you look at tweets about yourself. This seems sadistic to you, but she insists that it’s important that you know what you’re dealing with. “If you want to work in PR,” she told you, “you need to understand how bad it can get, from the inside. This is a great opportunity for you.”

“I’m sure you’d like to read fifteen hundred tweets about how ugly you are,” you told her, talking back for the first time ever.

“I already know all about how bad it can get,” she said. “I’ve been doing this job for a long time.”

The fact is, you’re pretty sure the reason she’s being so mean is Harry. She’s stressed out because it’s been six hours and she still doesn’t know where he is. We all know where he _was_ , because every now and then some Directioner stalker posts something like “Harry sighting in Central Park! Somewhere in the Rambles but I’m not sure where. Headed north!” But by the time it hits Twitter, that’s old news. Andy’s out trying to follow him, but Harry’s tricky, it turns out.

So far today he’s walked through Central Park, gone to the Met, taken the subway far downtown, been chased by a mob of Directioners into a cab, fled to a hotel in the West Village, and then...nothing. He must have convinced someone to sneak him out somehow, because the trail’s gone cold. Unless Andy found him and hasn’t reported in yet, which seems unlikely.

Christina’s job has mostly been to keep track of the paparazzi shots as they surface online, to communicate with management, and to worry. She seems to have channeled all that into you.

Harry’s antics haven’t actually managed to overshadow your date, except in Christina’s mind. For every Directioner tweeting about “Harry’s Big Day Out” (as they’ve started to call it already) there’s twenty obsessing over every aspect of your life. And, you realize, they’ve found out _a lot_ about you, including that the party in Boston was with your friends.

It’s strange reading their fantasies about what your life is like. They’ve never met you, but they’re developing a character for you already. The ones who like you have decided you’re the mousy girl working behind-the-scenes that Harry finally noticed. The ones who don’t like you have decided that you’re probably a gold-digger. The worst of them are the ones tweeting pictures of Cara Delevigne at Harry with messages about how much prettier she is than you.

No, scratch that: the worst ones are the Larries. It’s not because of anything they’re saying about you. It’s because they’re closest to the truth, and yet, they’re so, so wrong. They’re certain you’re a beard, because Harry’s hot for Louis, and that is true. But they keep saying things like “he probably hates her, management probably assigned her to him,” and you can’t believe that’s true. The paparazzi photos couldn’t look so, well, _romantic_ if Harry hatd you. He’s not an actor. Even if the sex was just to prove to himself that he could, or for some other bad reason you don’t understand, he couldn’t have faked being your friend…

Your phone buzzes.

> Maddy (3:30 PM) i know ur busy cause youve ignored me all morning but some girl just showed up at my dorm  
>  Maddy (3:32 PM) can u plz tell me what to do? she’s a directioner obviously and she says she’s a MIT student so its not all that creepy but still

Shit. And if Maddy’s getting that kind of attention, your parents probably are too. _Shit._

“Christina?” you say. She looks up from her anxious phone-typing. “What should I tell Maddy to do? Someone’s shown up at her dorm asking about me.”

“I’ll call her,” Christina says sharply.

“And I ought to call my parents too, right?”

“No. Jo’s taken care of that,” she says.

You call anyway. You can’t bear to look at more tweets right now, and this is a perfect excuse to talk to your mom. Okay, so you can’t tell her the truth—you wouldn’t want to, now that you’re less distraught. Your mom doesn’t need to know about the state of your hymen. But you think it’ll be good to hear her voice, good to know that there’s somebody outside of this crazy life who cares about you, not as Harry’s fake girlfriend, but just as yourself. The little girl who couldn’t sing but always wanted to be around singers. The teenage barista. The almost grown-up person who was about to go to college when her life was completely, totally, and utterly messed up by the biggest band in the world.

Nope. No parents. Voice mail.

“Mom, Dad? I just wanted to make sure you knew I was OK. I guess Aunt Jo already probably called you about everything going on, but I thought you should hear from me. I guess things might be weird for awhile? Anyway, I’ll call you back?”

Christina is listening to you. “Good,” she says. “Keep it vague.”

“They’re my parents!” you complain, but she ignores it.

“We have to leave for the venue in 15 minutes,” she tells you. “Harry had just better show up, that’s all.”

You notice how tense her shoulders are and for the first time ever, you feel a little sorry for Christina. None of the boys have told her what’s going on, and you’ve denied everything, too. She hasn’t earned your trust, and even if she had, some things are personal. So far as she’s concerned, Harry’s just gone totally out of his mind and decided to endanger himself, the band, and their first-ever Madison Square Garden show. That’s gotta suck.

“By the way,” Christina adds, “it was good that you told me about Maddy. The girl who showed up at her dorm is a little bit of a problem child. I’ve taken care of it.”

You want to ask what ‘problem child’ means, but you’re cut off by a phone call from Andy. Harry’s been found! Well, Harry was never really lost, he knows New York like the back of his hand. But Andy’s gotten to him, and apparently they’ve agreed that he’ll come back to the venue and not go on any more adventures. They’re on their way already.

You’re very apprehensive about the idea of being around him or Louis. When it’s time to go to Madison Square Garden, Liam maneuvers it so you don’t have to see Louis, coming up with some excuse so they take a separate car. You excuse yourself from hanging out in the green room, mumbling something about “helping Swaggy.” But you won’t be able to keep the separation up long, you know that. There’s no way in Hell Christina’s gonna let you skip this show. She’ll want to make sure that everybody in the world knows about you and Harry, and that means you’ll need to be somewhere super visible.

Maybe they’ll sing “Shut Up And Dance” again.

Maybe Christina will make Harry sing it to you.

You feel sick to your stomach. All you want is to run away. Instead of finding Swaggy, you head for the door and wander out into Manhattan. Harry can’t go anywhere without being mobbed, but you aren’t famous, not even after the paparazzi photos. Nobody bats an eye as you walk along 31st street and up 7th avenue, taking in the huge buildings, the traffic jam. Madison Square Garden is built on top of a train station, and not having any better ideas, you go down into it, ignoring men who try to sell you bus tours of New York City and harried moms whose kids try to trip you.

What would it be like if you were here with Harry? If he wasn’t famous. Maybe you’d be going somewhere. Taking the train. Like a normal couple.

Except one, you aren’t a couple, and two, Louis.

It’s not nice down in Penn Station. It’s basically a big underground mall that happens to have some trains in it, and not a very clean or nice mall either. There’s a shop called Tiecoon, an Auntie Anne’s, a bar called Kabooz’s. Caboose plus booze. Clever. As people rush past you, dragging suitcases and yelling for their traveling companions, you look up at the departures board. There’s a train leaving for Boston in just a few minutes.

You stare at it, unseeing, for a ridiculously long amount of time. You aren’t really planning to get on it—you don’t have any money on you, or clothes, or anything else. But…

You realize what your subconscious has been trying to tell you to do. _Maddy._ As soon as you think of her, your phone’s out of your pocket and you’re dialing. She picks up on the first ring.

“What’s wrong?” She sounds anxious. Edgy. You don’t remember her ever sounding that way.

“Nothing,” you start to say, but you know she’ll see right through that. “You had a girl come to your dorm?”

“That’s whatever,” Maddy says, brushing it off. “What’s wrong?”

Fuck NDAs.

You tell her.


	3. I

I don’t really know entirely why I decided to copy and paste an entire fanfic, or anyway all of one that’s written so far, into the beginning of this diary, and I don’t really know why I’m calling it a diary either, because it’s not—more like a memoir maybe except that makes me feel like some old woman named Annie who has an MFA and a 1950s childhood she can make seem really interesting, or alternately like a really famous person who’s got a ghostwriter to make a book that’s about twenty percent real and eighty percent how they’d like to be perceived. I suppose there are some people who think I’m really famous, and of course Harry and Louis are really famous, and maybe I shouldn’t write any of this down at all, maybe I should actually burn my diaries (the real diaries, I mean, the ones I kept day to day, not this thing that is hopefully going to be a cleaned-up cleared-up version of them) just to be quadruply safe and make sure that nothing gets out that shouldn’t get out. But then maybe this will be something that we decide should get out some day, who knows? If you had asked me six months ago where I’d be today, I’d never have guessed.

The reason I copied and pasted _Just For The Cameras_ in here is, when I first read it, it really threw me through a loop. I had been all over these here internets looking at the way that people talk about Harry, about Louis, even about me, and I’d seen almost everything, even fan art, but somehow I’d always avoided fiction, had even kept it out of my mind. I think I thought it was too arrogant to even begin to entertain the notion that someone might base their writing on me, but then, if I say that, after you’ve read twenty thousand words of writing based on me, it probably sounds falsely modest. Right?

Gemma Styles was the one who showed it to me, I think because she has a secret addiction to _Harry Potter_ fanfic and she kept running across things about her brother, only she would never share anything about him with him because that would genuinely and truthfully be too weird. When she did she was like, okay, you aren’t going to have a hen night (which is the British name for bachelorette parties) so instead we’ll have to embarrass you with this. And then she made me sit down and read it while Lou Teasdale did unspeakably complex things to my hair.

But her plan backfired, not in a bad way, but just that it didn’t embarrass me. Reading it made me think a lot, about a lot of things: about the narratives the press makes, and the narratives that fans make; about the narratives that we make for ourselves, and for the characters we love; about the narratives that I’d gotten myself into, over the years, and the narratives that I was pulling myself out of. And all this is now horribly self-indulgent and probably would make no sense to anyone reading this, but as I’ve said, I don’t think anyone else will read this, so I’m allowed.

But I do want to write down what really happened, the way I see it, and to get it right, if only to solidify it in my head—I know better than anybody that it’s easy to talk yourself round to things, one way and then another, especially if you are as weak-minded as I can be sometimes, and I can envision a time in the future when I let myself get talked round to some very different memory of what happened to me over the past few months. So I want to have it all down, and I will.

Here’s what was most funny to me reading the fanfic version of my life:

  1. What idiot would think that I didn’t know about the internship before I went to that first 1D concert? They made me get a _background check_ before I could even think about interning.
  2. How do they know about Aunt Jo? That’s some high quality stalker shit right there and I would be impressed if I wasn’t so freaked out.
  3. I actually swear kind of a lot, probably more than I ought to, sorry everyone it’s just the truth, and anyway who cares?
  4. I can’t tell if they (the writer) are into Harry and me together (I think the ship name is Harrah which makes me think of Farrah Fawcett or Harrod’s or maybe Farrah Fawcett dating Harrod’s, like that woman who I read about who announced she was buildingsexual and wanted to marry a bridge) or into Louis and Harry together but they’re definitely not into Louis and me together, which is funny for a lot of reasons.
  5. They got one really important thing right, which is: when I first met Harry and Louis, they were in love, and I was the third wheel, but it didn’t stay that way for long.



* * *

So: On to the real story. You have pored over the pictures of Harry and I on our first date eating fifteen-dollar deviled eggs and arugula salads and steak frites, and you have possibly even sat at the table where we lingered, licking spoons of house-made sweetcorn ice cream; but if I know Directioners, I know that it is more likely you’ve made your pilgrimage to the Chelsea club where Louis is known to go find mystery blondes and, perhaps, in your fevered imagination, dance with Harry in back rooms.

What you can’t know is the times I had with him in his tour bus—not the boys’ tour bus, which always smelled of feet and served as parade ground for a battalion of thots, but Harry’s tour bus, the ‘quiet bus’ as they called it, which always smelled of vanilla candles and served as combination meditation center and songwriting studio. Niall kept his guitar there, but it was Harry’s kingdom through and through, and when I was first given leave to enter I knew it was a hard-won privilege.

I had left home the week I graduated high school, and gone to intern with Aunt Jo; I had joined the tour in Los Angeles, and for weeks rode in the crew bus with the rest, learning to appreciate the cast of characters there: silent Christina; the bodyguard Dumb Dan, who was not so much stupid as off-kilter; Lou Teasdale, eternally sorting her makeup kaboodles, constitutionally unable to let me simply keep my eyelashes clean and un-mascaraed; Moony and Max and Ronnie and Juan and Logan, an ever-rotating cast of the few stagehands lucky enough to get a berth and not be piled into their own cars, drinking gallon jugs of 7-11 coffee to stay awake and drive through the nights. They were a friendly bunch, and amused to help a a virginal high school graduate find her footing. But still I wasn’t sorry to get my summons to the quiet bus, where Harry waited, or to his hotel suite, always an individual hotel suite for him and another for each of the boys, a bastion of quiet.

We would sit and play Quiddler (Scrabble was his normal vice, but he had lost too many tiles on tour, though Words with Friends made an acceptable substitute) and talk of nothing, what had happened that day, what Lou Teasdale had done to my face. And then usually he would end up talking about Louis. It was a strange sort of halfway conversation, because I hardly knew Louis at all, even after so long with the tour, but just well enough to know that Harry was right: Louis was perfect, perfect, and we were just about fit to worship him.

Harry could have spoken for hours about him—about the shell curls of his ears, the lank fall of his hair when it was unwashed or the pillowy tuft of it when it was washed, the depth of his brow and the delicacy of his eyebrows’ arches. He _could_ have spoken this way. He didn’t: instead, he spoke of jokes Louis had played, bad opinions Louis held (and good ones); things they had done together in London and in New York; the X-Factor house and how he missed the enforced closeness there. Their relationship, such as it was, had blossomed in the hothouse of reality TV, and Louis was the perfect subject for that medium, infinitely jesting, infinitely changeable. Harry thought himself to be the straight man, dull and slow-speaking, a backdrop for Louis to perform against.

Is it any wonder, dear diary, that I was utterly convinced Harry was gay? Gay, and with a crush on the same boy as me. It didn’t occur to me that anything could ever, possibly happen between us, even while the paparazzi were taking the most romantic-looking pictures, even when we adjourned at the end of the night to Harry’s hotel room to watch _Sherlock_ and argue over finer points of characterization, wasting time so that any moles in the band’s security apparatus would believe we were slipping it in. If I’d have had girlfriends to tell about it, they would have had questions and notes, would have read about this setup in chick lit or watched it on some trashy Freeform channel soap, would have wondered whether I was being used or tricked, but that’s another thing the fanfic didn’t get right: I didn’t have friends like that.

That’s not to say that I didn’t have friends. I had friends the way anyone might; I wasn’t picked last for group projects or team sports; I went to the movies once or twice with a girl named Karlie who was popular and cool, before she became too cool for me; I had, more than once, slunk away at lunchtime to smoke a joint with the punks beneath the East Building stairs. But these friendships never lasted past the school year, and I spent summers mostly on my own, reading and exercising and keeping myself to myself. Maddy Martin was one of my old reliables, always pleased to sit next to me in class but never too close; in Boston I involved her with the band mostly because she was the only person I knew in the city, and slightly because I knew she had a soft spot for One Direction and a reputation for being cool and going to college parties even in high school. I didn’t want anyone to laugh at the boy-banders we were supposed to be too old to like, and I didn’t want the boy-banders to think I was lame.

But even after Boston I wasn’t close enough to Maddy to ask her opinion, and so I slowly came to see Louis Tomlinson through the kaleidoscope of Harry’s eyes, and to believe that they ought to be together. No: they were _meant_ to be together, and Louis was refusing to do anything about it: Harry confessed, after a bottle of wine and season two of _Sherlock_ , that they had ‘messed around’ plenty in the past, but Louis had grown cold and distant and (he thought) ashamed of being with a man. I seethed, and Harry sighed, and blew a curl away from his face, and said, “That’s just Lou, I guess: he doesn’t think too hard about anything, just does what he feels. And he doesn’t feel like being with me. Very honest, that.”

“Honest about being a homophobe?” I said. I have said many things in the past that I might not choose to repeat now, if I were transported back in time, and that is one of them, but if I am going to write this I will be as honest as it is possible for me to be, and so: that is what I said. “Whereas you’re free and easy as the wind. Management can’t keep you down! You’re pan and loving your queer lifestyle—“

He covered his face in his hands and moaned. “Not the Larry management thing! Why does everyone always say management’s keeping us down?”

“Well, you just admitted that #larryisreal, so...”

“Not like that,” he groaned. “Whatever I might want to happen, it’s not happening. Lou won’t. So it’s a stupid crush.”

“But you needed me to be your beard.”

Harry frowned. “I do date women, you know.”

“But you love Louis.”

“I can love women too,” Harry protested, and I thought for a moment that I had actually offended him. “I just don’t. Right now.”

I felt protective of Harry, an instinct I now see was fostered in me by Christina’s particular views on her job and mine. I felt that it was my job to make things right, that even if I would never be with Louis I could help Harry be with him; that it was pure serendipity that I, of all the young women in the world, had been hired, because I was the only girl who would really understand what Harry needed, the perfect wingwoman. It seems to me, now, like the plot of some embarrassing teen comedy, the kind of movie I would disdain to see when I was in high school because only dumb girls indulged in fantasies of romance, but at the time it seemed like the obvious and sensible thing to do, to try and matchmake.

I had to figure out how to get Louis to spend time with me, and not think I was hitting on him; I knew that wouldn’t be easy, because when I first went to work with One Direction I had thought I needed to act like I was at least a marginal fan; I had thought everyone would like me better if I liked them. So I picked Louis out of a hat, as my “favorite,” although I could hardly tell him from Liam at first, and soon enough everyone at Aunt Jo’s company knew, and Christina told him about my “crush” on some long and boring car ride, and ever since I had felt a chilly space between us, made worse by my slow-growing appreciation for him, the hours I spent with Harry singing his praises, the incremental formation of the Louis Tomlinson Fan Club, membership consisting of Hannah and Harry (and about ten thousand girls all over the world).

Fortunately I knew Louis’ weakness was Marmite, and I knew he had just run out, and I knew that everyone on the tour with us was refusing to buy him more for various and puerile reasons (Christina thought he needed to eat less and work out more, a foolish idea if I ever heard one, because he was as thin as a whippet; Dumb Dan didn’t like Marmite himself and wouldn’t indulge anyone else in it; Lou Teasdale was irritated that he wouldn’t let her cut his hair, and wasn’t going to make his life better in any way if she could help it). So I determined that I would bribe my way into Louis’ good graces, and that was, strangely enough, the origin of #HarrysBigDayOut. He wanted to go along to buy Marmite, and I said no, because while I may be a very foolish person in many ways I am not a complete idiot; but soon enough he batted those big green eyes at me and said, “but Hannah, you know what the best strategy to convince people our date was real would be? Being caught sneaking around,” and then he was following me around like a shadow, and then the charming snake had me sneaking him out of the hotel in a laundry basket.

Of course it didn’t last. We weren’t far enough away from the hotel when he came out of hiding, swathed in dirty linens and shouting about the foulness of someone else’s dirty towel, and almost in slow-motion I saw the very back of the pack of fans gathered around the service entrance begin to realize they had missed something, the confusion and then the excitement in their faces, and then they turned, slowly, like a pack of dogs, and they were on us.

“Pack of dogs” sounds insulting, and it is, I suppose, but the problem is not viciousness: they simply wanted to love Harry to death, and they had never seen him without his handlers, without bodyguards, with only me between him and them. He tumbled out of the basket, knocking it over in the process, and he grabbed my wrist and started to drag me away, but no matter how hard I held on and no matter how much he yelled for some space, there was no arguing with the mass of people: soon not only the fans but also the paparazzi, also passers-by, the bored and curious who saw excitement and walked toward it not away. We were separated within seconds.

I suppose Harry managed to get ahead of the crowd and decided the whole thing was a lark. He rarely gets to go anywhere alone; it must have been appealing to pit his wits against the fans, to stay just a couple steps ahead, the joy of the fox as the hounds pursue him. The worst that would happen if he were caught would be an orgy of hugs, of photos, of autographs on arms that would within hours be converted to tattoos: hardly the end of a foxhunt.

But I digress. I did eventually get the Marmite and used it as bait to get Louis to spend time with me; I had to pretend to like it myself and even eat some of it, my God, the things I do for these boys. Harry was still on the loose, fleet as the wind.

“’is this him 75 th  and lex,’” Louis read off his phone, “No, obviously it’s not him, you wanker, this lad’s got his shirt buttoned, has Haz ever buttoned a shirt in his life?”

“I think he has once, the other day,” I offered.

“Yeah, for a costume.” Louis tipped his head back and tried to balance his Marmite toast on his nose. His nose is distinctive, wide-bridged and snub, but not particularly large, so it was an unsuccessful attempt. I loved his silliness. “Do you think we could write a song about this? Something about being on the run?”

“Like Bruce Springsteen? We are in New York, after all, New Jersey’s just over the river...”

“BABY, WE WERE BORN TO RUN!” Louis sang at the top of his lungs. He was off-key and I adored it and him. “Nah, it’s not really being on the run, innit?”

“I think it’s about urban blight,” I admitted.

“Well, every good song’s not about what it’s supposed to be about,” he said, and I loved even his confused and imprecise way of speaking.

“’Steal My Girl’ isn’t about stealing your girl?” I asked.

He sat up the way Liam does in interviews, ramrod-straight with his hands in his lap, prim as a good kid on the first day of school. “You know, it’s actually about stealing my dreams,” he said, keeping his face straight. “My dream of being a drama teacher, stolen by the pressures of international stardom.”

I laughed, and lost my grip on myself—he was such a satirist—and said, “that doesn’t even make sense! Besides, didn’t you get a pile of cash and Harry out of the deal?”

He might have interpreted it in a dozen different ways, that Harry was a good collaborator or a good harmonizer or a good bandmate or a good best friend, but he knew exactly how I meant it. His lips pressed together so tightly I couldn’t see them and I thought, for a moment, that he was going to eject me, that he would call Christina and say that it was me or him, that one of us had to go, and then I would be packed away on an airplane and sent home and that would be the end of everything, but instead he went on in his Liam-giving-an-interview voice and said, “I believe my people asked there be no questions about that particular topic? I’m ashamed of you, Giuliana!”

I laughed as though it was a riotously funny joke. A moment later Louis was “off to practice for tonight.” The jar of Marmite congealed yeastily on the table, abandoned.

Visions of the wolf-pack of fans swam before me. Was I being as bad as the Larries at concerts, the ones that held up signs saying KISS HIM ALREADY and YOU’VE LOVED HIM SINCE YOU WERE EIGHTEEN with riotous rainbow stripes and purple glitter? I had seen them enough, in the time I had been with the tour, to diagnose them: they were possessed by an incubus, not in the form of one person but of two, and those two inseparable. An incubus is a spiritual being, not a physical one, and so no reality could ever satisfy them. I didn’t think I was one of them, because my knowledge of the situation came directly from the source, not from suppositions and paparazzi photos and conspiracy theories—but how could I know?

I was about to work myself into a mire of self-loathing when Zayn poked his head around the door. “Overheard you and Tommo there,” he said, the first complete sentence I’d ever heard him utter.

“What part?” asked I.

“The part where you tried to get him to admit he’s head-over-heels for Harry,” Zayn said.

“You mean the part where I made him hate me forever.”

Zayn ducked his coiffed head, using that mass of thick black waving hair as a sort of shield against my cynicism. “Think that’s an exaggeration.” He slid into the room in the tentative way he had. He wore black jeans ripped artfully here and there, a black shirt, a long thin black silk scarf. He seemed like a waif.

“It’s not an exaggeration,” I said.

“Well, I disagree. Niall and I worry about them, too.”

“You mean you worry...”

“That they’re never going to sort it out between them, yeah.” Zayn crossed his arms and inhaled. He seemed to grow in stature as he straightened his spine; really it was that he arose from his semi-permanent slouch and showed himself as the tall young man he really is. “I think we’ll have to do something about it.”

That was the genesis of our cunning plan, our very cunning plan, which I mean with all the _Blackadder_ implications of the phrase. Zayn was genuinely worried about the mental and physical health of his friends, but Niall was perhaps more concerned with discomfiting them and playing a truly great practical joke; his first proposal for a plan was finding One Direction action figures and doing a puppet show with them in front of Harry and Louis. The show would end with mashing the action figures together like Barbie and Ken getting down and dirty. This did not seem like it would be effective.

His next idea was a game of Truth or Dare, skimming uncomfortably close to the events proposed in _Just For The Cameras_ , where we were all in on the joke and continually dared them to kiss; or, if they chose Truth, asked them to confess their feelings. This seemed equally poorly thought-out: Louis had a temper, we all knew, and he would become angry when he realized we were ganging up on him, and we couldn’t vouch for what he’d do.

The third idea was to lock them in a room until they had settled the situation. The tour bus was proposed and rejected: true, Louis preferred to sleep in it, saying it felt like home (everyone else regarded this as something rather odder than a quirk: the bus smelled like takeout and feet and had only a chemical toilet that backed up at least once a week. Louis persisted in it and it had long ago ceased to be a topic of conversation). However, the bus had emergency exits; they could crawl right out, if they were irritated enough. But Harry’s bedroom door opened outwards onto the shared center of the penthouse suite. We laid our plans: after the show no one would bother the band, and we’d take the phones from Harry’s room, entice him and Louis inside, then barricade the door. Twelve or eighteen hours together would surely do the trick; they’d either be dead or have kissed and made up.

Any intelligent person would have listened to this plan and realized its many flaws. Louis was the sort of person to batter down a door, no matter how much he had to pay the hotel, how embarrassing explaining it would be, nor how much he had to injure himself in the process. Then, again, in the case of a fire they might die. If any of the bodyguards or Christina had figured out what was going on, they would have put a stop to it immediately. And of course, there’s no guarantee that forcing two people into a room together will have any particular outcome.

But Niall has the luck of the Irish and all went smoothly and according to plan. We all returned from the venue in that strange tired and yet enervated state that proceeds from performances; we had some number of beers in the suite with a few of the crew, pale crisp lagers that seemed more for hydration than intoxication.

Early on in the evening Harry announced that he was tired. On every previous instance this would have been my cue to leave; I was not on friendly terms with the rest of the band, and knew that when I was with them it was on Harry’s sufferance; but the dynamics had shifted, and I stayed, and drank, and outlasted the rest of the crew. Louis was visibly distressed by my presence, a fact for which I felt guilty; Liam suggested that perhaps I was tired as well (suffering, it seemed, from cold feet: we had convinced him to take part in the plot, but against his vocal disapproval) and I presented him with a fa _ç_ ade of blank neutrality.

Then we sent Louis in to check on Harry. Tipsy as he was, this rather transparent excuse didn’t even register as odd to him.

The moment he entered Harry’s room, I slammed the door shut. Niall, Zayn and Liam moved the heavy chestnut side-board to stop it from opening, grunting with the effort as they slid it into place. Then we sat through, in order:

  1. Louis swearing at us
  2. Harry saying that the prank wasn’t funny
  3. More Louis swearing
  4. Harry pointing out, rightly, that they could die in a fire with the exit blocked
  5. More Louis swearing



And then there was silence.

Liam nearly caved. “What if Harry’s having an asthma attack?” But Zayn and Niall grabbed his arms and marched him to the couch and poured beer down his throat and turned on some deeply violent game and made him play until he calmed down, or rather, until he became violently agitated in other ways, shouting at anonymous opponents with various and creative vulgarities.

We slept that night on the floor of the living room of the suite, like children at a sleep-over, so as to be available if anything went really wrong. But there was no sound from Harry’s room.

And here is the part where I write my own fanfiction, because I know none of the details of what happened that night, apart from the fact that they emerged with a smell of sex and blissed-out expressions. But what I like to imagine happened is this:

Louis was more than a little drunk by the time he got into Harry’s room; he didn’t even hear the door close behind him, nor the groans and grumbles as the heavy sideboard slotted into place across it. He hadn’t thought about the fact that Harry sleeps naked when he’d gone to check on him—wouldn’t have done it if he had. But there Harry was, sprawled out, mostly covered by perfectly white hotel linens.

Harry is naturally trusting, like a little child, and he was even more that way in the earliest days of his friendship with Louis, on the _X-Factor_. That’s what shook Louis most: seeing Harry so open and vulnerable. It had been months since he’d seen that side of his friend, months since they’d been perfectly free and easy with each other, and here Harry was, as perfect and innocent and calm and relaxed as he could be. He sat down on the bed, hoping the movement would wake Harry before things went further. It didn’t.

Some part of Louis’ brain surely had registered the commotion outside the door, but he didn’t think about it, not right away. He levered himself down to lie on the bed next to Harry, reaching a hand out to brush one of the long curls away from his face. This was a luxury they’d never had: a bed to themselves. It was always furtive hand-jobs in a bunk, slaps on the ass that could be explained away as jokes. It wasn’t kisses or tender moments.

“Mm,” Harry murmured, turning to face Louis fully, the covers riding down to expose more of his sleek sides as he did. He moved like a starlet in a tasteful movie’s sex scene and that was the realization that propelled Louis off the bed—because he couldn’t help feeling that he’d corrupted Harry, that in their desperate teenage fumblings he’d taken something important that could never be put back in place. Because he wanted a family, a traditional family, with a mum and a dad, and he always had, and so did Harry. And Liam and Sophia were so loved-up, and Zayn and Perrie too. But Harry wouldn’t even date, wouldn’t think about women; he was too stuck on Louis. And Louis couldn’t date, not really, not with a mind to the long-term. What self-respecting woman would want him if they knew what he wanted to do to Harry? Had done to Harry?

Because he did want to do those things to Harry. He wanted to do them so badly he could feel the desire pounding in his blood, in every capillary, just beneath the surface of his skin.

The movement of the mattress as he got up finally jostled Harry awake, and that’s when they discovered the barricade, discovered what we’d done to them. They thought it was a prank, knew we’d let them out eventually, but they knew it could be a long time too: Niall isn’t known for half-assing pranks, and they could surely hear him cackling on the other side of the door.

And so when they finally decided yelling wouldn’t do any good, that’s when I like to imagine Harry realized he was naked and had been the entire time, that he turned red, that he turned his back on Louis and fumbled around for some boxers; and that Louis said “What, you got something new that I haven’t seen before, Hazza? Prince Albert maybe?” And then Harry turned around, angry, trapped, and at the look in his eyes, so desperate and wanting and miserable, Louis finally snapped and crossed the distance between them and kissed him.

Louis finally snapped. Harry is all surface; every emotion plays on his face, all the time. Louis is the opposite. He clowns, makes witty remarks, songs-and-dances his way through the world to divert all attention from anything he might actually be thinking or feeling. He diverts his own attention that way, even, cajoling himself out of thinking things like “Harry looks delicious today,” or “I wish I could be honest, but I can’t.”

So when all that dammed-up emotion was loosed, when the river overflowed its new channel and went back to its natural pathway, Louis was voracious. A trashy novel might say that “he wanted to possess Harry completely,” but he was beyond forming words of any sort. His fingers dug deep into the soft skin of Harry’s waist and propelled him bodily towards the bed—never mind that Harry was the larger of the two, never mind that only a moment before he was primed to have a knock-down drag-out fight over a theoretical Prince Albert. But there wasn’t much force necessary, because after a moment’s surprise Harry was right there with him, there and open, welcoming, twining his arms around Louis’ neck, keening his approval when Louis pushed his jeans-clad leg up against the purple head of his sudden erection.

They had never made love before that night, never gone that far, but they didn’t negotiate either, didn’t ask each other whether they were ready, whether this was a good idea. Louis didn’t even bother to get undressed, the first time.

Neither of them bothered with anything, not all night long.

But like I said, I don’t really know what happened that night. No one does; neither of them have told me details. And for all that the plan to get Louis and Harry together worked in the short term, in the medium term it was a severe failure.

* * *

This is the point where the tour abandoned itself. I say that because I did not abandon the tour, nor did it abandon me. There was a planned hiatus of two weeks after the “American leg” (a phrase which made me think of AC/DC and knocking someone out with my thighs, a singularly unlikely occurrence). The other American members of the tour, with the exception of Christina, would be furloughed in the states until some distant future date. Presumably they would find new tours to join or new jobs to do. The paparazzi would hardly follow me without Harry present—not yet, not until our relationship was of longer duration—so I would remove my contacts and put on my blissful glasses and enjoy a fortnight scrubbed free of makeup. The band members would fly to the UK to spend time with their families, and we would all meet back up in London when the tour resumed.

I would have been perfectly happy to spend this gap period either in London or in New York, but the choice was out of my hands: I had to wait for the Post Office or whoever is in charge of these things to finish deliberating and issue me a passport. We had hoped it would come before the boys left New York, but it had not. Therefore I was remanded to the home of one of Aunt Jo’s college friends in Brooklyn.

Bushwick was less than a half hour from Manhattan on the subway, but it felt as distant as the moon: a neighborhood where bakeries specializing in _pasteles para todo ocasión_ were set cheek-by-jowl with pristine white boxes of art galleries and rundown auto-parts shops, a neighborhood where there were no skyscrapers and no crowds at all.

Aunt Jo’s friend João was very small, ambiguously gendered, and wore a bucket hat. He had quick eyes and quick hands and seemed to shop exclusively in the children’s section of thrift stores. Upon entering his home, I thought perhaps that I would sleep in the room he usually Airbnb’d, then vacate the premises during the day, but that quickly proved impossible. I woke up on the first morning of my stay at almost noon to the sound of João making pancakes and doing the nae nae. Soon I was eating the pancakes and doing the nae nae too.

I had never been to a house so strange. There was no living room to speak of: every room with two means of egress had been rented to someone, and they were all performance artists, all friends, and all extraordinary in different ways. On the first day, after the blueberry pancakes, I met Stevie, a bodybuilding Asian boy who taught me to solder as he constructed a robot that would recognize people it had been introduced to. Later, I learned to make a theremin produce sounds like a dying cat. The second day I figured out how to make the theremin sound a bit less like a dying cat and started on a project to write an interactive story, guided by Berry, a woman I assumed was a runway model from her height, weight and chain-smoking but who apparently was actually a design student at Pratt.

As a child I had wanted to make things as much as anyone else, I suppose. I certainly loved to write and to read, and spent hours and hours composing worlds for myself, visions of how things might or should be. I had never lived in a place, however, where others shared the impulse to create, where they continually indulged this impulse, far beyond the sensible. They seemed brave to me: to try to solder is one thing, a skill that can be learned, or to play the theremin (easy to dismiss as a joke), but to create performances that don’t conform even the tiniest bit to the requirements of a Broadway production? Even to create a performance that conformed: wouldn’t you fall short of genius, and be laughed at? To write stories, to begin to program computers, to do things that truly expanded one’s mind?

There was no one in New York to laugh at me. The city was too enormous for my comprehension and for all that João was Aunt Jo’s friend, I didn’t believe he would report on my doings to her. To me, at the time, he and his roommates seemed anonymous, their creations secure because they were obscure. So I began to write—the first time I took writing seriously in my life, the first time I thought perhaps I could aspire to being a writer, even though my composition was in the format of a silly text game.

It was on the third day, when we were preparing to go into Manhattan to see a gallery opening that someone described as “1990s computer graphics barfing all over the nudes you took for your last scummy boyfriend,” that someone knocked on the door.

“Hannah!” João caroled as I tried to decide what of my outfits looked least stupid in the context of avant-garde Brooklyn hipsters. “Someone’s here to see you!”

It was Harry, of course.

It was raining, that kind of hard summer rain that comes down in sheets and makes the streets run like rivers and then suddenly stops, and he was drenched, dressed in a sodden green Obsession sweatshirt and a knotted kerchief that must once have been jaunty, carrying a sad half-empty duffel bag. “Take pity on me?” he asked, with a dime of a smile.

A minor miracle: João and his roommates didn’t recognize Harry, or if they did they were very good at pretending otherwise. Later I discovered that they had taken him for some roadie I was sleeping with, until Berry recognized his jeans as some designer so elite that mortal humans could never dream of owning their clothes. (It turned out Berry was, indeed, a model, to help pay for school, but didn’t like to talk about it.) But on that day they simply said they’d go on to the opening, and I sent Harry off to take a hot shower. By the time he emerged, his hair hanging in drippy straggles, he was almost ready to explain why he had come. I poured him a cup of red tea and led him back to the room where I was staying, as there wasn’t anything remotely resembling a couch. We sat on the bed, our backs against a wall, and stared at the wall adjacent, where João or someone had strung five poorly-developed photographs of the Manhattan skyline.

“This is going to sound stupid,” he said, “but I had this idea that things with Louis were just going to—to work out.”

I stayed silent, having nothing to say.

“I guess I thought that he was going to be as excited as I was. Now that we were together again. I knew we wouldn’t be out to the whole world. But I thought maybe he’d come back to Holmes Chapel with me. We’d see Gemma.”

I could hardly breathe. “But he didn’t want to.”

Harry dunked the teabag in and out of his mug, a heavy hand-thrown monstrosity. “Yeah.”

“Can I give you a hug?” I asked.

His face crumpled, but he didn’t cry. He nodded, set his tea on the bedside table, and put his arms out like a child. His head was heavy on my shoulder, his still-wet hair making a damp patch on my tattered old t-shirt. I could feel his breath on the top of my breast.

“I don’t understand how he could do that,” Harry finally said.

I could. From all the Louis stories Harry had told I knew that it had been Louis’ M.O. for years. It wasn’t meanness, exactly: he could be mean, but this was something else, a self-centered nature maybe. He was intensely aware of what other people thought of him, channeling that awareness into jokes and pranks. He was afraid of himself, maybe. He couldn’t see how he hurt other people because he was so afraid of being hurt.

My insights wouldn’t help Harry, though. “He loves you,” I told him.

“Not enough.”

“I’m sorry.” I gingerly reached up to cradle the crown of his head in my hand, working my fingers through his hair. It was already beginning to dry into curls.

I couldn’t say when the hug changed exactly. One moment it was tender, maternal. I could feel my heart beat and I knew he could feel it too. The next moment Harry had shifted his head just a tiny bit and I could feel his mouth against me, not just his breath. Then he pushed himself up, his face too close to mine.

I couldn’t process what was happening, not then. Half of me knew Harry’s intentions had changed, that he wanted comfort of a different kind, but another part couldn’t admit it. I was hypnotized by his warm green eyes, observing the tiny details of his face, the fact that he had a freckle beneath his right eye, impossible to notice from further away.

His eyes flicked up and down. His lips touched mine, ever so gently.

“Harry?” I asked, uncertain.

“You’re so lovely. You’re so kind,” he said, and lifted one broad hand to cup my cheek. My hand was still in his hair. I knew my mouth was open, I was gaping, because wasn’t this the person who was just heartbroken over Louis Tomlinson, wasn’t this Harry Styles—and wasn’t he queer as a three-dollar bill?

But he kissed me again, solidly this time. He was careful, slow, exploring the contours of my face with his thumb. His tongue traced every millimeter of my lips before softly opening them, and I couldn’t resist him. I let him in. He tasted like Lipton’s tea.

I never thought that kissing Harry could be comforting, could be cozy, but it was. He was touching me like I was made of glass, and it was the tenderest thing I could imagine, nothing like the pawing clawing horrors that my friends had described when they’d been kissed—and they’d all been kissed, and I’d been jealous in an abstracted sort of way, and gone back to my reading and dismissed the idea that it might someday happen to me. And year after year had gone by. And when Aunt Jo had asked me about my internship and whether I would be willing to play a role for Harry Styles, I had said that I wasn’t very interested in men, and that I thought I might be gay. And I still didn’t know whether I was gay, but I knew now that “not very interested in men” was a lie.

I was very interested in Louis, and Harry, and what they might do together.

“Harry,” I said, when he finally moved away from my lips to kiss up the line of my jaw. “Harry, you don’t want to do this.”

“Because you know so much about what I want to do,” he said, whispering in my ear, his body a heavy soft weight pressing mine back into the pillows. He wasn’t forceful, not in the least, but it didn’t matter: my traitorous body complied.

“This is a rebound,” I insisted. “You know it is.”

He laid his head on my shoulder, breath still hot against my neck.

“You can’t replace Louis with me,” I said.

“I can try,” he said. It took me a moment to recognize the humor in his voice. I laughed. He laughed. Thank God.

“Let’s just be friends, okay?”

“Okay.”

But he didn’t move, didn’t stop touching me, and I didn’t make him. I was sorry about Louis, angry with Louis on some level, but also glad.

Because Louis’ unwillingness to let Harry in meant that I got Harry to touch and comfort and be near. They wouldn’t ride off into the sunset just yet. And, I was discovering, being near Harry was something I wanted very badly.

 


End file.
